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S ix test elephants, each paired with a partner, at the Thai Elephant Conservation Center in Lampang quickly learned that whether they were led to the rope ends at the same time or not, pulling together meant corn. Working in pairs, elephants learned to pull on the rope together to get tasty corn, says psychologist Joshua Plotnik, now at the University of Cambridge in England. The animals didn’t just learn a trick by rote (机械地), he says, but rather showed signs of grasping the basics of how cooperation works. For example, elephants alone at the snack site learned not to pull at the rope or leave before their partners arrived up to 45 seconds later to help with the task, Plotnik and his colleagues report online March 7 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “That’s a long time for an animal waiting for food，” he says. And elephants weren’t just learning that they needed a partner beside them, Plotnik says. When researchers positioned one end of the rope so the partner could arrive but was unable to do any useful pulling, the first elephant sometimes gave up the hopeless task and turned away, even when the partner was still in place. Understanding elephant cognition has special urgency these days, Plotnik says. He hopes that better understanding the animals will lead to new strategies for reducing conflicts between elephants and expanding human populations nearby. | 
