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      Insightful Problem Solving in an Asian Elephant

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          Abstract

          The “aha” moment or the sudden arrival of the solution to a problem is a common human experience. Spontaneous problem solving without evident trial and error behavior in humans and other animals has been referred to as insight. Surprisingly, elephants, thought to be highly intelligent, have failed to exhibit insightful problem solving in previous cognitive studies. We tested whether three Asian elephants ( Elephas maximus) would use sticks or other objects to obtain food items placed out-of-reach and overhead. Without prior trial and error behavior, a 7-year-old male Asian elephant showed spontaneous problem solving by moving a large plastic cube, on which he then stood, to acquire the food. In further testing he showed behavioral flexibility, using this technique to reach other items and retrieving the cube from various locations to use as a tool to acquire food. In the cube's absence, he generalized this tool utilization technique to other objects and, when given smaller objects, stacked them in an attempt to reach the food. The elephant's overall behavior was consistent with the definition of insightful problem solving. Previous failures to demonstrate this ability in elephants may have resulted not from a lack of cognitive ability but from the presentation of tasks requiring trunk-held sticks as potential tools, thereby interfering with the trunk's use as a sensory organ to locate the targeted food.

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          Most cited references43

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          The mentality of crows: convergent evolution of intelligence in corvids and apes.

          Discussions of the evolution of intelligence have focused on monkeys and apes because of their close evolutionary relationship to humans. Other large-brained social animals, such as corvids, also understand their physical and social worlds. Here we review recent studies of tool manufacture, mental time travel, and social cognition in corvids, and suggest that complex cognition depends on a "tool kit" consisting of causal reasoning, flexibility, imagination, and prospection. Because corvids and apes share these cognitive tools, we argue that complex cognitive abilities evolved multiple times in distantly related species with vastly different brain structures in order to solve similar socioecological problems.
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            Abrupt transitions between prefrontal neural ensemble states accompany behavioral transitions during rule learning.

            One of the most intriguing aspects of adaptive behavior involves the inference of regularities and rules in ever-changing environments. Rules are often deduced through evidence-based learning which relies on the prefrontal cortex (PFC). This is a highly dynamic process, evolving trial by trial and therefore may not be adequately captured by averaging single-unit responses over numerous repetitions. Here, we employed advanced statistical techniques to visualize the trajectories of ensembles of simultaneously recorded medial PFC neurons on a trial-by-trial basis as rats deduced a novel rule in a set-shifting task. Neural populations formed clearly distinct and lasting representations of familiar and novel rules by entering unique network states. During rule acquisition, the recorded ensembles often exhibited abrupt transitions, rather than evolving continuously, in tight temporal relation to behavioral performance shifts. These results support the idea that rule learning is an evidence-based decision process, perhaps accompanied by moments of sudden insight. Copyright 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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              The learning curve: implications of a quantitative analysis.

              The negatively accelerated, gradually increasing learning curve is an artifact of group averaging in several commonly used basic learning paradigms (pigeon autoshaping, delay- and trace-eye-blink conditioning in the rabbit and rat, autoshaped hopper entry in the rat, plus maze performance in the rat, and water maze performance in the mouse). The learning curves for individual subjects show an abrupt, often step-like increase from the untrained level of responding to the level seen in the well trained subject. The rise is at least as abrupt as that commonly seen in psychometric functions in stimulus detection experiments. It may indicate that the appearance of conditioned behavior is mediated by an evidence-based decision process, as in stimulus detection experiments. If the appearance of conditioned behavior is taken instead to reflect the increase in an underlying associative strength, then a negligible portion of the function relating associative strength to amount of experience is behaviorally visible. Consequently, rate of learning cannot be estimated from the group-average curve; the best measure is latency to the onset of responding, determined for each subject individually.
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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Role: Editor
                Journal
                PLoS One
                plos
                plosone
                PLoS ONE
                Public Library of Science (San Francisco, USA )
                1932-6203
                2011
                18 August 2011
                : 6
                : 8
                : e23251
                Affiliations
                [1 ]Biopsychology and Behavioral Neuroscience Program, The Graduate Center, The City University of New York, New York, New York, United States of America
                [2 ]Smithsonian National Zoological Park, Washington, D.C., United States of America
                [3 ]Department of Psychology, Hunter College, The City University of New York, New York, New York, United States of America
                Harvard University, United States of America
                Author notes

                Conceived and designed the experiments: PF DR. Performed the experiments: PF MG TB. Analyzed the data: PF DR. Wrote the paper: PF DR. Animal management: MG TB DEM. Facilitated NZP research: DEM.

                Article
                PONE-D-11-10898
                10.1371/journal.pone.0023251
                3158079
                21876741
                e2027715-4ed5-4a70-a42f-023352d5aff5
                Foerder et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
                History
                : 15 June 2011
                : 11 July 2011
                Page count
                Pages: 7
                Categories
                Research Article
                Agriculture
                Animal Management
                Animal Behavior
                Biology
                Evolutionary Biology
                Animal Behavior
                Neuroscience
                Animal Cognition
                Zoology
                Animal Behavior
                Social and Behavioral Sciences
                Psychology
                Cognitive Psychology
                Problem Solving
                Veterinary Science
                Animal Management
                Animal Behavior

                Uncategorized
                Uncategorized

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