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Elephants know when their bodies are obstacles to success in a novel transfer task
The capacity to recognise oneself as separate from other individuals and objects is difficult to investigate in non-human animals. The hallmark empirical assessment, the mirror self-recognition test, focuses on an animal’s ability to recognise itself in a mirror and success has thus far been demonst...
Autores principales: | , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Nature Publishing Group
2017
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5389349/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28402335 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep46309 |
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author | Dale, Rachel Plotnik, Joshua M. |
author_facet | Dale, Rachel Plotnik, Joshua M. |
author_sort | Dale, Rachel |
collection | PubMed |
description | The capacity to recognise oneself as separate from other individuals and objects is difficult to investigate in non-human animals. The hallmark empirical assessment, the mirror self-recognition test, focuses on an animal’s ability to recognise itself in a mirror and success has thus far been demonstrated in only a small number of species with a keen interest in their own visual reflection. Adapting a recent study done with children, we designed a new body-awareness paradigm for testing an animal’s understanding of its place in its environment. In this task, Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) were required to step onto a mat and pick up a stick attached to it by rope, and then pass the stick forward to an experimenter. In order to do the latter, the elephants had to see their body as an obstacle to success and first remove their weight from the mat before attempting to transfer the stick. The elephants got off the mat in the test significantly more often than in controls, where getting off the mat was unnecessary. This task helps level the playing field for non-visual species tested on cognition tasks and may help better define the continuum on which body- and self-awareness lie. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-5389349 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2017 |
publisher | Nature Publishing Group |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-53893492017-04-14 Elephants know when their bodies are obstacles to success in a novel transfer task Dale, Rachel Plotnik, Joshua M. Sci Rep Article The capacity to recognise oneself as separate from other individuals and objects is difficult to investigate in non-human animals. The hallmark empirical assessment, the mirror self-recognition test, focuses on an animal’s ability to recognise itself in a mirror and success has thus far been demonstrated in only a small number of species with a keen interest in their own visual reflection. Adapting a recent study done with children, we designed a new body-awareness paradigm for testing an animal’s understanding of its place in its environment. In this task, Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) were required to step onto a mat and pick up a stick attached to it by rope, and then pass the stick forward to an experimenter. In order to do the latter, the elephants had to see their body as an obstacle to success and first remove their weight from the mat before attempting to transfer the stick. The elephants got off the mat in the test significantly more often than in controls, where getting off the mat was unnecessary. This task helps level the playing field for non-visual species tested on cognition tasks and may help better define the continuum on which body- and self-awareness lie. Nature Publishing Group 2017-04-12 /pmc/articles/PMC5389349/ /pubmed/28402335 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep46309 Text en Copyright © 2017, The Author(s) http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ |
spellingShingle | Article Dale, Rachel Plotnik, Joshua M. Elephants know when their bodies are obstacles to success in a novel transfer task |
title | Elephants know when their bodies are obstacles to success in a novel transfer task |
title_full | Elephants know when their bodies are obstacles to success in a novel transfer task |
title_fullStr | Elephants know when their bodies are obstacles to success in a novel transfer task |
title_full_unstemmed | Elephants know when their bodies are obstacles to success in a novel transfer task |
title_short | Elephants know when their bodies are obstacles to success in a novel transfer task |
title_sort | elephants know when their bodies are obstacles to success in a novel transfer task |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5389349/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28402335 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep46309 |
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