The importance of sensory perception in an elephant's cognitive world

Abstract

The three living species of elephants (Elephas maximus, Loxodonta africana, L. cyclotis) have evolved adaptive, sensory perceptual abilities to successfully navigate the physical and social environments in which they live. In this article, we review research evaluating the sensory perception of elephants across four sensory modalities-vision, audition, touch, and chemosensation. We also address how these sensory modalities have been incorporated into empirical investigations of elephant cognition. Last, we discuss the importance of considering sensory perception when interpreting elephants' performance on cognitive tasks and the potential application of perception and cognition research to wild elephant conservation. Our review suggests that elephant cognition experiments should rely less on visual, primate-centric testing paradigms that neglect the elephant's multimodal sensory perception and instead focus on providing elephants with a complete sensory experience. Specifically, where appropriate, elephants should be given access to acoustic and olfactory information in cognitive experiments to ensure that results are due to the elephant's cognitive capabilities rather than confounds of experimental design. Based on what we now know about elephants, attention to their complementary visual, olfactory, and acoustic perception is crucial for understanding how they make decisions in their natural world.

Acknowledging the Relevance of Elephant Sensory Perception to Human–Elephant Conflict Mitigation

“…This paper is not intended as a comprehensive review of what we know about elephant sensory perception (for that, see Ref. [14]). Instead, using general terminology intended for both a public and a scientific audience with open access to this paper, we present our perspective on encouraging active consideration of animal behavior and sensory perception in human-wildlife conflict mitigation and conservation efforts.…”

“…Elephants rely on olfaction as one of their primary sensory modalities [12,14,[36][37][38]. They use olfactory information both to gather information about conspecifics [39] as well as to forage (e.g., [40]) with considerable research to date on the complexity of both functions.…”

“…The elephants' specialized ears provide an acoustic complement to their sense of smell, allowing elephants to gather an extraordinary amount of multi-modal sensory informa-tion [14]. The auditory system is particularly sensitive to low-range sound frequencies.…”

“…Both (particularly apes and elephants) have demonstrated a capacity for flexibility in cooperative interactions (e.g., [4][5][6][7][8]) and reassuring conspecifics in distress [9,10]. However, primates are primarily visual animals [11], while elephants prioritize olfactory and acoustic information [12][13][14]. These differences in sensory perspectives make it challenging to draw comparisons about animal intelligence and to study it directly, as research on these different species may require markedly different experimental approaches.…”

Aging: What We Can Learn From Elephants

“…Evidence from both Asian and African elephant ethological research suggests that elephants likely have strong spatial and episodic memories. They appear to navigate complex physical and social environments over hundreds of miles using direct and indirect experience ( Jacobson and Plotnik, 2020 ). Other research has shown that elephants retain long-term memory of reward stimuli ( Markowitz et al, 1975 ), can identify and locate more than 100 out-of-view family members ( Bates et al, 2008 ), and can spatially locate waterholes over 100 km distances and extended periods of time (more than 3 years) ( Polansky et al, 2015 ).…”