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Bates, L. A., & Byrne, R. W. (2007). Creative or created: Using anecdotes to investigate animal cognition. Methods, 42(1), 12–21.
Abstract: In non-human animals, creative behaviour occurs spontaneously only at low frequencies, so is typically missed by standardised observational methods. Experimental approaches have tended to rely overly on paradigms from child development or adult human cognition, which may be inappropriate for species that inhabit very different perceptual worlds and possess quite different motor capacities than humans. The analysis of anecdotes offers a solution to this impasse, provided certain conditions are met. To be reliable, anecdotes must be recorded immediately after observation, and only the records of scientists experienced with the species and the individuals concerned should be used. Even then, interpretation of a single record is always ambiguous, and analysis is feasible only when collation of multiple records shows that a behaviour pattern occurs repeatedly under similar circumstances. This approach has been used successfully to study a number of creative capacities of animals: the distribution, nature and neural correlates of deception across the primate order; the occurrence of teaching in animals; and the neural correlates of several aptitudes--in birds, foraging innovation, and in primates, innovation, social learning and tool-use. Drawing on these approaches, we describe the use of this method to investigate a new problem, the cognition of the African elephant, a species whose sheer size and evolutionary distance from humans renders the conventional methods of comparative psychology of little use. The aim is both to chart the creative cognitive capacities of this species, and to devise appropriate experimental methods to confirm and extend previous findings.
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Wittemyer, G., & Getz, W. M. (2007). Hierarchical dominance structure and social organization in African elephants, Loxodonta africana. Anim. Behav., 73(4), 671–681.
Abstract: According to the socioecological framework, transitivity (or linearity) in dominance relationships is related to competition over critical resources. When a population is structured into groups, the intensity of between- versus within-group competition influences the form and function of its social organization. Few studies have compared the type and relative intensity of competition at these two levels. African elephants have well-structured social relations, providing an exemplary system for such a study. We report on dominance hierarchies among free-ranging elephants and evaluate the factors that drive their socioecological structure to lie in a region of the three-dimensional nepotism/despotism/tolerance space rarely observed among social species; namely, where non-nepotistic, transitive dominance hierarchies within groups emerge despite kin-based philopatry and infrequent agonistic interactions over widely distributed resources. We found significant transitivity in dominance hierarchies between groups. Dominance relations among the matriarchs of different social groups were primarily age based, rather than driven by physical or group size, and group matriarch rank influenced the dominance relationships among nonmatriarchal females in the population. Our results suggest that between-group dominance relationships induce tolerance among group members, which in combination with high group relatedness, reduces the benefits of nepotism. We postulate that cognitive abilities and high risk of injury in contests enhance winner and loser effects, facilitating the formation of transitive dominance relationships, despite widely distributed resources over which infrequent competition occurs. The interplay of cognitive abilities, winner and loser effects, resource distribution, and within- and between-group dominance relationships may produce behaviour in other strongly social mammals that differs from that predicted by a superficial application of current socioecological models.
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