Study on Elephant Cognition

Abstract

Cognitive abilities of elephants had not been studied so much until recently despite many anecdotal evidence of their enormous potentialities. But today, more and more researchers are becoming interested in studying their cognition, especially their general intelligence, memory, and numerical cognition. Genetically elephants are more closely related to the small-brained aardvarks and manatees than to primates, but a few evidence indicate that their cognitive ability is comparable to that of apes. We aim to introduce series of recent work on elephants and some suggestions for future studies. Especially, we would like to point out the importance of studying their cognition from the point of view of field of human language evolution and animal welfare in captivity.