据台湾“中央社”报道，科学家对动物展开“指示测验”(pointing)时发现，对动物而言这是罕见的天赋。即使人类近亲黑猩猩等，似乎也对通过“手指指向”雾里看花。不过研究显示，大象可能例外。
据报道，英国圣安德鲁大学(University of St Andrews)生物学家柏恩(RichardW. Byrne)和他的学生史梅特(Anna Smet)表示，他们发现大象似乎看得懂指示。他们对11只大象做测验，结果发现大象具有的深度社交智能在某些地方可与人类匹敌。
史梅特在遮挡物后放置2个水桶，再将水果放进其中1个水桶，但大象并未看见她将水果放进哪个桶子。
她接着把水桶从遮挡物后头拿出来，站在桶子中间，指向装有水果的桶子。管理员接下来带大象走向水桶，史梅特便开始注意大象先把鼻子伸进哪个水桶。
经过2个月后，实验结果发现，大象选中装有水果桶子的机率达67.5%。
史梅特发现，不管是以手臂或手指出方向，大象能懂得她的指示。而当她仅站在桶子中间，无任何指示时，大象会变成随机选取水桶。
研究结果刊载于《当代生物学》期刊(Current Biology)。（Bioon.com）
生物谷推荐的英文摘要
Current Biology DOI：10.1016/j.cub.2013.08.037
African Elephants Can Use Human Pointing Cues to Find Hidden Food
Anna F. Smet， Richard W. Byrne
How animals gain information from attending to the behavior of others has been widely studied， driven partly by the importance of referential pointing in human cognitive development [1，2，3，4]， but species differences in reading human social cues remain unexplained. One explanation is that this capacity evolved during domestication [5，6]， but it may be that only those animals able to interpret human-like social cues were successfully domesticated. Elephants are a critical taxon for this question： despite their longstanding use by humans， they have never been domesticated [7]. Here we show that a group of 11 captive African elephants， seven of them significantly as individuals， could interpret human pointing to find hidden food. We suggest that success was not due to prior training or extensive learning opportunities. Elephants successfully interpreted pointing when the experimenters proximity to the hiding place was varied and when the ostensive pointing gesture was visually subtle， suggesting that they understood the experimenters communicative intent. The elephants native ability in interpreting social cues may have contributed to its long history of effective use by man.
