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With their massive flapping ears and long trunks, it isn't hard to believe that elephants tend to rely on acoustic and olfactory cues for communication. They use gestures and visual displays to communicate as well, but we don't really know how much. Visual communication research has mainly focused on species that are primarily visual, like nonhuman primates.

A previous study demonstrated that African savanna elephants can recognize human visual attention based on a person's face and body orientation, but this had yet to be investigated in their Asian cousins. Asian elephants split from African elephants millions of years ago, so their behavior and cognition differ in some aspects.

Motivated to find out whether Asian elephants share this ability with African elephants, a team of researchers at Kyoto University turned their attention to elephants in Thailand. The findings have been published in Scientific Reports.

"After conducting doctoral work on how elephants form reputations, I wanted to test whether Asian elephants understand when humans are paying attention to them," says corresponding author Hoi-Lam Jim.

The research team headed to Chiang Rai in northern Thailand, where they engaged 10 captive female elephants in a food-requesting task. The experimenter conducted the task while arranging her body orientation in one of four positions: with both her face and body toward the elephant, with both away from the elephant, only the face toward, or only the body toward the elephant.

Then the team analyzed how frequently the elephant directed signals to the experimenter in each position, including the elephant's reaction when the experimenter was not present.

The researchers observed that the elephants gestured most when both the experimenter's body and face were oriented towards them, and body orientation appeared to be a stronger visual cue than face orientation. However, this effect depended on the face also being oriented towards the elephant.

"We were surprised to find that the elephants did not gesture simply because a human was present," says Jim. When no one was there, the elephants gestured as if a person was standing there with their body turned away. This shows that elephants are sensitive to body orientation, but that they do not respond to the mere presence of a human.

These findings suggest that Asian elephants do indeed understand the importance of visual attention for effective communication, and that elephants are not sensitive to face or body orientation alone, rather they rely on a combination of cues to recognize human visual attention.

By revealing more about elephant intelligence, how it compares across species, and how complex abilities evolve in animals, this study deepens our understanding of elephant cognition and adds to broader research on visual attention in animals. In the future, the research team plans to focus on other aspects of Asian elephant cognition, such as cooperation, prosociality, and delayed gratification.