Elephants Know When a Strategy Stops Working and Can Quickly Change Course

Elephants struggled when scientists changed the rules but then adapted surprisingly fast.

Researchers gave an Asian elephant what looked like a simple problem: get a piece of fruit out of a box.

The food sat inside a clear acrylic cube mounted at about eye level. The elephant could see it through the front and smell it through small holes, but the front of the box was sealed. The only way to reach the reward was to move its trunk around the box and find the single open side.

At first, the researchers kept that opening in the same place, giving the elephant a chance to learn the route. Then they rotated the box so that the opening appeared somewhere else — to the left, right, above or below. The solution that had just worked no longer did.

The elephants hesitated when that happened. They took longer to find the fruit after the opening moved, suggesting that they initially tried to rely on the route they had just learned. But with repeated trials, they quickly adjusted and found the new opening.

That behavioral pivot is at the heart of a new study of Asian elephants. Researchers tested 16 elephants at Thailand’s National Elephant Institute and found evidence that the animals possess inhibitory control—the ability to suppress an immediate or habitual response in favor of a more useful one. The results suggest that elephant intelligence also involves switching strategies when previously learned solutions are no longer useful.

“When elephants were faced with a situation where they needed to suppress an impulsive behavior—either the impulse to reach directly toward a food reward behind a transparent and perforated barrier, or the impulse to continue using a previously (but no longer) effective technique—they generally performed well,” Sydney Hope, the study’s lead author and a researcher at Hunter College, told ZME Science.

“When they first learned to detour around a barrier in a certain orientation and then the orientation changed, detouring was slower at first, but elephants quickly improved and learned to detour around the novel orientation. Together, this suggests that elephants can stop using an obvious or previously successful strategy when it no longer works.”

The Test

The researchers worked with 8 male and 8 female Asian elephants ranging from 4 to 60 years old. All lived at the National Elephant Institute in Lampang, a Thai government-run conservation and veterinary facility, where each elephant has a mahout, or caretaker.

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The experiment centered on a 40-centimeter acrylic cube mounted on a tree at roughly the elephant’s eye level. Researchers placed a favored food—pineapple, apple, or banana—inside. One side of the cube remained open.

First, the elephants learned to reach around an opaque version of the box to get the food. The researchers then substituted a transparent box with holes in its front, meaning the animals could both see and smell the reward directly ahead. Yet they continued taking the indirect route they had learned.

That sounds like impressive self-control, but Hope cautions against reading too much into it.

“The transparent-box trials are more difficult to interpret because there was no ‘characteristic error pattern’,” she explained. “So, elephants’ fast detouring performance around the transparent box may be because 1) they are very good at suppressing an impulse to reach straight toward the food or 2) an impulse was never evoked.”

A convincing test of inhibition should first reveal the pull of the wrong response, followed by evidence that the animal can suppress it. That pattern emerged when the researchers changed the location of the box opening.

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After four trials with the opening in one position, they shifted it elsewhere—left, right, above or below. The elephants’ average time to enter jumped from about 2.2 seconds to 8.2 seconds immediately after a change. With repeated attempts at the new orientation, their response became faster again.

“I don’t think they were overriding the old solution but, rather, they were being flexible in finding new solutions,” Hope said.

Better Fit For an Elephant

Scientists have been using detour experiments for more than a century. A 2018 study found that researchers had used versions of the test in at least 127 studies spanning 96 species, from birds to primates. They use such experiments to probe planning, learning, and inhibition.

Elephants, however, presented something of a puzzle. A 2014 study found that species with larger brains generally performed better on tests of self-control, yet elephants did surprisingly poorly on one of them. In the so-called A-not-B task, an animal first learns that a reward appears in one location. The experimenter then moves it to a new spot, and the animal must resist returning to the place that was rewarded before and instead choose the new one. Elephants often failed to make that switch, an unexpectedly weak showing for such large-brained animals.

The new study suggests the test itself may have been part of the problem. That earlier task depended heavily on watching a human move a reward. Elephants can see well enough to use visual information, but they rely heavily on smell, hearing, and touch. Designing an experiment around human-style visual cues may therefore underestimate what they can do.

“One challenging aspect of designing cognitive experiments for elephants is that we need to think about how they experience the world,” Hope said. “Elephants use their senses of smell, touch, and hearing more than their vision.”

By the final experiment, the researchers randomly moved the opening on every trial. The elephants consistently found it in about 4.5 seconds on average, suggesting they had shifted from repeating a memorized move to rapidly searching for whatever solution worked now.

Flexibility Outside the Box

Older elephants were slower when the opening changed, even after the researchers accounted for baseline differences in movement speed. This hints that this particular kind of cognitive flexibility may decline with age, though the study included only 16 animals and skewed toward younger elephants, making that conclusion preliminary.

The bigger question is what this mental flexibility does for an elephant outside an experiment.

Hope points to rapidly changing landscapes.

“From an elephant’s perspective, inhibitory control may be helpful when attempting to navigate around a barrier, such as an electric fence, that is blocking an agricultural field,” Hope explained. “In this case, to avoid getting shocked, they would need to suppress the impulse to walk straight toward the crop field. Instead, they would need to find alternative solutions, such as navigating around the fence or knocking over areas that are not conductive (i.e., the wooden poles).”

“Importantly, understanding how elephants think when they detour around barriers may help with developing new techniques to mitigate conflict between elephants and people, and may help farmers who are faced with elephants who repeatedly detour around barriers,” she added.

The same flexibility elephants use to solve an experimental puzzle may also shape how they respond to human-made obstacles. For farmers and conservationists, that means they cannot design effective barriers around the assumption that an elephant will keep making the same mistake.

The study was published in the journal PLOS One.