Authai is an Asian elephant. She can count like us.

Author: Robby Berman / Source: Big Think

Asian elephants and African elephants diverged, evolutionarily, more than 7.6 million years ago.
In a recent study, an Asian elephants named Authia, was found to count numbers.
Authia seems to not be held back by other animals’ numeracy limitations.

In recent years, we’ve seen a variety of animals exhibit some proficiency at counting.

Lions only attack other prides whose members outnumber their own, numerous critters can count, and bees appear to understand zero. Meet Authai, a 14-year-old Asian elephant living in Ueno Zoo in Japan. She’s the subject of a recent study from the Graduate University for Advanced Studies and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. The study offers the “first experimental evidence that nonhuman animals have cognitive characteristics partially identical to human counting.”

Much experimentation assessing animal numeracy involves the recognition of differences in quantities of similar objects. However, where other animals’ accuracy is affected by subjects’ distances from the objects — they need to be close together — by the number of objects used, and the ratio of differences between numbers of objects, none of that seems to bother Authai — for the study, she accurately assessed numeric differences with a success rate of 66.8 percent, or in 181 out of 271 tries, regardless of the variations researchers presented her.

A trunk for touchscreens

Authai is one of three Asian elephants the researchers instructed on the use of a special touchscreen — the other two failed to master the technology.

Authai’s laptop sat atop a dolly and was outfitted with 46′′ LCD touchscreen.

Asian elephants have been shown in previous studies to have higher “relative quantity judgment” (RQJ) than other elephants. It’s not known why, but, as the study notes, “The Asian elephants and the two species of African elephants diverged more than 7.6 million years ago, so it is highly probable that they developed different cognitive abilities.”