The "mirror self-recognition task" used in cog dev involves placing children in front of a mirror with a red dot on their forehead. Up until a certain age the baby treats the image as if it's another child and tries to interact and play with it. However, the older babies will realize that they are looking at themselves and will reach up to pull the sticker off their forehead.
They have done the same thing with chimpanzees and elephants and it's really cool to watch the videos. You see the chimpanzee try to attack its reflection at first, but then it slowly figures it out and starts grooming its hair and checking out its teeth and stuff. (And then peeling the sticker off its forehead.)
I've seen some of those videos before. I believe the chimp was called betty, but nevertheless, they gave it/her make up and it started drawing on itself using the mirror as a guide. Another clip showed it immitating one of the handlers putting make up on and it started using lipstick on its lip, instead of its face.
To be honest this is far less interesting than the things elephants do in the wild.
Aside from the usual stuff humans like about some animals, like pair bonding, raising their young and living as a family, and being very social with each other and even other species (including humans), there are a lot of other human-like traits of elephants. Elephants have astonishingly long memories (it's a wives tale that turns out to be true). They'll pause on the spot where loved ones have died, even many years later, and groups will console each other after a loss--having a funeral of sorts. They remember humans who have been cruel or kind to them in the past, and behave accordingly. They communicate vocally and are known to express a range of concepts this way--not just warnings, but also greetings, calls, and "names" (unique identifiers specific to each elephant). And, recently humans "asked" elephants to carry cameras into the forest for them, to help study tigers. Since elephants and tigers are on peaceful terms (what's a tiger gonna do to an animal that could crush it with one foot?) it worked well, and some amazing footage resulted.
Given all of this, it shouldn't be at all surprising that an elephant could be trained to paint a particular picture. It is rather unfortunate that it takes something like this to impress tourists of the intelligence of one of our closest intellectual peers, when elephants have so many more fascinating traits and ways of exhibiting impressive intelligence.
I agree 100%. The things animals do in the wild are much more fascinating especially when you consider techniques that humans do not grasp.
The video is interesting but misleading. I would highly doubt that the elephant has a clue as to what it's painting. Elephants have an incredible memory and amazing dexterity, those two things coupled together makes it likely that the elephant is painting from memory. The elephant also demonstrates some advanced painting skills that i'm sure it was taught. I would be more impressed of some cave paintings done in wild naturally by animals.
Amazing... does anybody have any more information about this? Is this a trick where an elephant gets trained for many years to draw images, and gets used to the actions of moving the paintbrush across a canvas in a particular way (still an awesome feat)? Or do elephants naturally have drawing skills? Is there evidence that wild elephants draw things on cave walls, etc. by scratching on them with rocks or something?
Most likely, operant conditioning was used to build the behavior-set over time. There are 3 different videos where the elephant is painting the same picture, a raised trunk holding a flower, on different canvases and the elephant always starts with the same line.
Operant conditioning uses small rewards with increasing requirements to build behaviors. At first the elephant got a peanut for picking up the brush, then only for swinging it by the paint, then only for dipping it in the paint, etc.
The elephant likely does not have any conception of what it was drawing; most animals can't mentally translate abstract 2D images to 3D. Even humans, if they do not develop perspective during a critical period (if you were trapped in a small room for years, for example), will not understand perspective correctly.
The funny thing is that the elephants probably wouldn't regard this as particularly intelligent behavior. Well, except to the extent that a stunt that gets you peanuts can't be all bad.
On the other hand, if some elephants managed to use operant conditioning (and a special prosthetic, like a big drum) to teach a human how to subsonically tell another elephant ten miles away that the herd is gathering near the water hole, that human would be the star of the elephant world. The elephants would gather round to marvel at the human's astonishing front feet -- they aren't really very strong, but they can pick things up with their toes, almost as if they were using a trunk!
I also think this is a case of nothing more than operant conditioning.
I once saw a demonstration of how they trained a mouse to navigate an obstancle course (supposed to be a cross-section of inside a house wall with joists and so on) for some movie. When trained, the course took the mouse about 20 seconds to run and it looks like it must be one really smart mouse. But really, it learnt the route one step at a time over a period of days. I suspect a similar technique is used here.
They have done the same thing with chimpanzees and elephants and it's really cool to watch the videos. You see the chimpanzee try to attack its reflection at first, but then it slowly figures it out and starts grooming its hair and checking out its teeth and stuff. (And then peeling the sticker off its forehead.)
Here is a series of YouTube videos on this:
http://youtube.com/results?search_query=mirror+self-recognit...