"The elephants caught on as quickly as chimpanzees, elevating themselves to such heady company as great apes, dolphins and crows, according to Plotnik, of the department of experimental psychology at England's Cambridge University."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/08/elephant-intelligence-study_n_832522.html
How does this relate to what we have been studying in History & Systems?
This was a really interesting article. I thought it relates to what we were learning in terms of comparative psychology. I would really like to know more about the experiment. How did they figure out that they needed both? Was it by seeing other elephants succeed that way? I think that is the most interesting part the story. This relates to comparative psychology in that first of all it says they quickly got on the same level as apes in terms of their behaviors. Also i think that if the questions i mentioned before were answered it could provide some more insight into learning processes.
I saw this on the news and thought this was very interesting, as well as this article. I would have never thought elephants would be considered on of the more smarter animals in the world. Especially to compare them to apes. I feel that this is related to history and systems in the terms of comparative psychology in the evolutionary side. This could change some matter in which animals we possibly have evolved from. Who knows maybe now we may have some more relations to elephants more than apes. I feel that studies like these are important to understanding species and all the capabilities of all species.
Wow... I liked reading about this a lot! It amazes me how much animals can learn and even work together. I feel like this can be related back to the previous chapter with the guy with the cats in the box... Thorndike! This was probably trial and error learning on the elephants part and It would be interesting to study more in-depth what they can learn, retain, and use later.
I thought this was really interesting! It sounded a lot like Thorndike's cats in the boxes. The cats learned through trial and error learning that the right response gives them what they've been wanting, therefore reinforcing the correct response. I thought it was really interesting that the young elephant took it a step further and realized she could do no work and still get the food.
This article was very interesting to read. I like to hear about studies being done on animals and how they compare to us as humans. This would be related to comparative psychology because we are studying animal behavior. I think that animals are more intelligent that we expect them to be. They have many of the same learning capabilities as we do but it is just sometimes hard to understand them. Another thing I thought of when reading this article was that of Thorndike's puzzle box. The elephants were learning to perform the tasks just as the cats in Thorndike's study. I would like to read more on articles that involves research on animals .
I thought this article was very interesting to read about. I find it so fascinating how so many animals are starting to act like humans, or atleast we're now finding out that they do. This relates to the comparative psychology about animal behavior and whether it's animal intelligence or instinct. I think animals are a lot smarter then we give them credit to be, we just can't figure out how their minds work. I think this article might also relate to Darwin and his thoughts on Evolution. Elephants seem to be evolving just like apes.
we have talked about this sort of thing before. Like with Thorndikes puzzle box's. It was a battle between if the cats had "learned" what to do, or if it was trial and error over understanding of what to do. Maybe the elephants after many tries learned that they must pull both ropes in order to obtain the treat. Dolphines though learn on the lines of conditioning. like most animals and "trick" they learn by conditioning that when they emit the correct behavior they recieve a reward and then learn that that is what is expected of them. Animals just like humans exibit alot of the same learning traits that humans do.
Reading about this article is interesting and it reminds me of a clip I saw from Animal Planet about pandas. In times of distress, Pandas could also help each other out by climbing on each others backs to get over a wall, or trying to save one another. Just like the pandas, the elephants are also smart animals as well, helping one another out and utilizing tools to get what they need. This relates to comparative psychology and learning about animal behaviors and the evolution of characteristics of the animals in order to survive. I also agree with everyone elses comments on how it is related to Thorndike with trial and error.
This is a cute picture of a panda helping another panda out.
http://www.funny-games.biz/pictures/1821-clever-pandas.html
I thought this was really interesting because I never really thought of elephants as being as intelligent as dolphins or chimpanzees. It'd be interesting to learn more about the study and exactly how it was performed as well as additional results. But it seems as though they learned through trial and error as most animals do. However, I think they might be leaning on anthropomorphism a bit much though, in that they accredited a lot of human emotional responses and feelings to the elephants.
This was interesting to read but not surprising. I thought elephants were always known for their amazing memory or is that folk lore?
This relates to a lot of things we are learning about such as Thorndikes boxes and Skinner's boxes.
I'm always curious why people are so surprised when we learn that an animal is intelligent. Haven't we known for awhile that dolphins are intelligent? As well as chimpanzies? If animals weren't capable of learning, survival of the fittest would play it's role, right?
I have to completely agree that it amazes me that it is so shocking to people when we discover that animals are quite intelligent. I think that society has it so set into their minds that animals are all inferior to us and that they are not smart and capable of the many things in life. That is why I think behavioral studies on animals is quite interesting and very important. They not only show us how behaviors occur, but they are also revealing to society that animals are not stupid and they are capable of many things we are capable of.
I agree with the other statements that this relates to comparative psychology as well as ideas on evolution. But, I do not find this to be extremely surprising. I think that all animals are capable of basic emotions that we consider to be human; after all humans are part of the animal world. I don't think this shows that elephants are smarter than apes or vice versa, I think it just shows that apes are not the only form of animal that can figure things out. Within the various breeds of animals I believe that each has different levels of compassion and understanding of one another, and that they mostly just follow their instincts.
This article relates to what we have been learning in class by using conditioning. The elephants are essentially equivelant to what Tolman and Skinner did with rats. There is reward at the end of their tasks and they are tested over and over again to see progress in their actions. I also feel as if this article relates to comparative psychology and evolution. I feel as if it works as evolution on both the sides of the elephants and the sides of the humans. The elephants have evolved to form social networks and to learn from their peers. As humans, we are evolving because we are learning more about this animal and understanding more about how and by what means it lives its life. This could change the way we view many mammals that are not as similar to us physically but could be some of the base of where we learn from mentally overtime in evolution and how each mammal evlolved.
These elephants were obviously learning through trial and error. Trial and error is what Thorndike used to explain behavior of cats he was studying; it is the trying of various behaviors and actions until finding the one that works. Another thing that the elephants learned was that working in partners was faster than working alone, all of their different trials showed that working together was going to be better. Another thing that this article has is anthropomorphism. Anthropomorphism is the tendency to give human characteristics to nonhuman things, like when the article states that it was obvious the elephants cared for each other and were attached to one another because of how they helped one another and worked together.
It is crazy to see that we have so much more to learn about animals and their capabilities! I have never thought as elephants as being really intelligent animals, and it makes me wonder about what other animals are out there with this kind of intellectual ability. I think it is great that they are going to use this information to try to keep elephants safer.
Elephants are so cool! It's amazing how much we are still learning about certain animals that we have been familiar with for a long long time. It's not like we just discovered elephants or anything, it's just the first time we've thought to do an experiment like this with them. It was a very cool example of training elephants to use operant conditioning. They really did learn quite fast. It was really cool that the researchers tested to see if the elephants would realize that the experiment wouldn't work if only one end of the rope was available. It was surprising to see that even with this wrench thrown into the mix they learned quite quickly. With all these various animals being comparable to apes and dolphins it makes me wonder if there is much difference between particular species and their mental capabilities.
I would say this particular situation/article relates to cognitive psych, comparative psych, and survival of the fittest. I've heard of so many different types of animals being trained that I'm not too surprised. If you put in the effort and time I feel almost anything animal can be trained. I know that some are going to learn faster and more fluent than others. But seeing elephants at the circus and zoo trained to put on shows doesn't make this surprising for me to read. But seeing that they are wild animals, it's always interesting to see when training occurs in the animal kingdom.
But I did find the experiment they conducted with the elephants to test their learning to be interesting and impressive to see the elephants ability of recognition and how quickly they caught on. Seeing how animals don't talk, but we do know that they communicate… I sometimes wonder what goes through their minds and what they say to each other when humans are present or another species comes near.
Animals are much smarter than we anticipate, we just don't understand them exactly how they don't understand us.