Scientists surprised to find Asian elephants can resist impulses, plan and act

Asian elephants can inhibit their impulses to tackle problems more effectively, researchers say, putting them in a select group of animals with such ability.

Resisting an impulse in favour of more effective behaviour, known as inhibitory control, is key to human decision-making.

The ability is also demonstrated by some species of birds and mammals.

An experiment at the National Elephant Institute, Thailand, showed that Asian elephants possessed the trait of inhibitory control.

“When elephants were faced with a situation where they needed to suppress an impulsive behaviour, they were generally able to suppress the impulse,” researchers stated in a new study published in the journal PLOS One.

“This ability may be important for social interactions or for other aspects of elephant cognition, such as problem-solving.”

In the study, 16 elephants learned to reach their trunks around a box to take food from a single opening.

Then, they were presented with a transparent box with small front-facing holes through which they could see and smell food inside. The animals consistently resisted the temptation to reach directly for the food as they had initially learned and instead used an opening on the side of the box, researchers found.

When the box was rotated, the elephants at first succumbed to the impulse to reach for the previous position of the opening, but quickly changed this behaviour to find a new effective approach.

The adjustment in behaviour was slower in older individuals, likely due to cognitive decline from age, researchers noted.

“This study provides some of the first evidence for inhibitory control in this species,” scientists wrote, adding that more studies were needed to confirm this.

The experiment demonstrates the ability of elephants to resist impulsive but ineffective action in favour of indirect but effective behaviour.

This ability could be a key part of the problem-solving and socialising skills of elephants and could lead to effective strategies to avoid human-elephant conflict, researchers said.

“Understanding how elephants interact with and learn to detour around different types of barriers in controlled inhibitory control experiments,” researchers said, “may help us understand how they avoid or circumvent human-installed obstacles in the wild.”