Investigating Indirect and Direct Reputation Formation in Asian Elephants (Elephas maximus).

摘要: Reputation is a key component in social interactions of group-living animals and appears to play role the establishment cooperation. Animals can form reputation an individual by directly interacting with them or observing interact third party, i.e., eavesdropping. Elephants are interesting taxon which investigate eavesdropping as they highly cooperative, large-brained, long-lived terrestrial mammals complex organisation. The aim this study was whether captive Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) could reputations humans through indirect and/or direct experience two different paradigms: (1) cooperative string-pulling task (2) scenario requiring begging. Fourteen Thailand participated experimental procedure that consisted three parts: baseline, observation, testing. In observation phase, subject saw conspecific people-one cooperative/generous one non-cooperative/selfish. observer then choose person approach test phase. were tested second session 2-5 days later. We found no support for hypothesis experience, but these results may be due challenges design rather than lack capacity. discuss how potential ecological validity difficulty assessing motivation attentiveness elephants. Furthermore, we highlight importance designing future experiments account elephants' use multimodal sensory information their decision-making.