Animal Sciences Commons^™

Habituation To Auditory Stimuli By Captive African Elephants (Loxodonta Africana), Sarah Elizabeth Goodyear

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Elephants are cognitive species that exhibit many types of learning. Associative, social, and insight learning have been investigated with elephants, but one of the simplest forms, habituation, has not. As an individual learns that a stimulus is neither harmful nor beneficial, it will decrease its response to the stimulus through the process of habituation. Elephants possess a well-developed sensory system and may habituate to stimuli that could be used for enrichment and/or management. The aim of this study was to examine the habituation process of elephants in response to repeated presentations of two auditory stimuli –buzzing by a disturbed beehive …