What Elephants Can Do: The Cognitive Capacities of Elephants

The list below is taken from the Nonhuman Rights Project's petition for a common law writ of habeas corpus filed on behalf of Beulah, Minnie, and Karen

(Nov. 13, 2017. Beulah, Minnie, and Karen v Commerford Zoo; Superior Court, Judicial District of Litchfield (NY))

Brief writers: David Zabel and Steven Wise

smartelephant

Elephant paints a self-portrait

Elephants such as Beulah, Minnie, and Karen possess complex cognitive abilities sufficient for common law personhood and the common law right to bodily liberty, as a matter of common law liberty, equality, or both under Connecticut common law. These include: autonomy; empathy; self-awareness; self-determination; theory of mind (awareness others have minds); insight; working memory, and an extensive long-term memory that allows them to accumulate social knowledge; the ability to act intentionally and in a goal-oriented manner, and to detect animacy and goal directedness in others; to understand the physical competence and emotional state of others; imitate, including vocal imitation; point and understand pointing; engage in true teaching (taking the pupil’s lack of knowledge into account and actively showing them what to do); cooperate and build coalitions; cooperative problem-solving, innovative problem-solving, and behavioral flexibility; understand causation; intentional communication, including vocalizations to share knowledge and information with others in a manner similar to humans; ostensive behavior that emphasizes the importance of a particular communication; wide variety of gestures, signals, and postures; use of specific calls and gestures to plan and discuss a course of action, adjust their plan according to their assessment of risk, and execute the plan in a coordinated manner; complex learning and categorization abilities, and; an awareness of and response to death, including grieving behaviors.

Specific Abilities/Characteristics of Elephants Identified by Experts in Affidavits:

African and Asian elephants share numerous complex cognitive abilities with humans, such as self-awareness, empathy, awareness of death, intentional communication, learning, memory, and categorization abilities. Many of these capacities have been considered — erroneously — as uniquely human; each is a component of autonomy.

African and Asian elephants are autonomous, as they exhibit “self-determined behavior that is based on freedom of choice. As a psychological concept it implies that the individual is directing their behavior based on some non-observable, internal cognitive process, rather than simply responding reflexively.

Elephants possess the largest absolute brain of any land animal. Even relative to their body sizes, elephant brains are large. An encephalization quotient (“EQ”) of 1.0 means a brain is exactly the size expected for that body size; values greater than 1.0 indicate a larger brain than expected for that body size. Elephants have an EQ of between 1.3 and 2.3 (varying between sex and African and Asian species). This means an elephant’s brain can be more than twice as large as is expected for an animal of its size. These EQ values are similar to those of the great apes, with whom elephants have not shared a common ancestor for almost 100 million years. A large brain allows greater cognitive skill and behavioral flexibility.

Typically, mammals are born with brains weighing up to 90% of the adult weight. This figure drops to about 50% for chimpanzees. At birth, human brains weigh only about 27% of the adult brain weight and increase in size over a prolonged childhood period. This lengthy period of brain development (termed “developmental delay”) is a key feature of human brain evolution. It provides a longer period in which the brain may be shaped by experience and learning, and plays a role in the emergence of complex cognitive abilities such as self-awareness, creativity, forward planning, decision making and social interaction. Elephant brains at birth weigh only about 35% of their adult weight, and elephants accordingly undergo a similarly protracted period of growth, development and learning. This similar developmental delay in the elephant brain is likewise associated with the emergence of analogous cognitive abilities.

Physical similarities between human and elephant brains occur in areas that link to the capacities necessary for autonomy and self-awareness. Elephant and human brains share Encephalization quotients (EQ) are a standardized measure of brain size relative to body size, and illustrate by how much a species’ brain size deviates from that expected for its body size.

Elephant brains have deep and complex foldings of the cerebral cortex, large parietal and temporal lobes, and a large cerebellum. The temporal and parietal lobes of the cerebral cortex manage communication, perception, and recognition and comprehension of physical actions, while the cerebellum is involved in planning, empathy, and predicting and understanding the actions of others.

Elephant brains hold nearly as many cortical neurons as do human brains, and a much greater number than do chimpanzees or bottlenose dolphins. Elephants’ pyramidal neurons — the class of neurons found in the cerebral cortex, particularly the pre-frontal cortex, which is the brain area that controls “executive functions” — are larger than in humans and most other species. The term “executive function” refers to controlling operations, such as paying attention, inhibiting inappropriate responses, and deciding how to use memory search. These abilities develop late in human infancy and are often impaired in dementia. The degree of complexity of pyramidal neurons is linked to cognitive ability, with more complex connections between pyramidal neurons being associated with increased cognitive capabilities. Elephant pyramidal neurons have a large number of connections with other neurons for receiving and sending signals, known as a dendritic tree.

Elephants, like humans, great apes, and some cetaceans, possess von Economo neurons, or spindle cells, the so-called “air-traffic controllers for emotions,” in the anterior cingulate, fronto-insular, and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex areas of the brain.29 In humans, these cortical areas are involved, among other things, with the processing of complex social information, emotional learning and empathy, planning and decision-making, and self-awareness and self-control. The presence of spindle cells in the same brain locations in elephants and humans strongly implies that these higher-order brain functions, which are the building blocks of autonomous, self-determined behavior, are common to both species.

Elephants have extensive and long-lasting memories. McComb et al. (2000), using experimental playback of long-distance contact calls in Amboseli National Park, Kenya, showed that African elephants remember and recognize the voices of at least 100 other elephants. Each adult female elephant tested was familiar with the contact-call vocalizations of individuals from an average of 14 families in the population. When the calls came from the test elephants’ own family, they contact-called in response and approached the location of the loudspeaker; when they were from another non-related but familiar family, one that had been shown to have a high association index with the test group, they listened but remained relaxed. However, when a test group heard unfamiliar contact calls from groups with a low association index with the test group, the elephants bunched together and retreated from the area.

McComb has demonstrated that this social knowledge accumulates with age, with older females having the best knowledge of the contact calls of other family groups, and that older females are better leaders than younger, with more appropriate decision-making in response to potential threats (in this case, in the form of hearing lion roars). Younger matriarchs under-reacted to hearing roars from male lions, elephants, most dangerous predators. Sensitivity to the roars of male lions increased with increasing matriarch age, with the oldest, most experienced females showing the strongest response to this danger. These studies show that elephants continue to learn and remember information about their environments throughout their lives, and this accrual of knowledge allows them to make better decisions and better lead their families as they age.

Further demonstration of elephants’ long-term memory emerges from data on their movement patterns. African elephants move over very large distances in their search for food and water. Leggett (2006) used GPS collars to track the movements of elephants living in the Namib Desert, with one group traveling over 600 km in five months. Viljoen (1989) showed that elephants in the same region visited water holes approximately every four days, though some were more than 60 km apart. Elephants inhabiting the deserts of Namibia and Mali may travel hundreds of kilometers to visit remote water sources shortly after the onset of a period of rainfall, sometimes along routes that have not been used for many years. These remarkable feats suggest exceptional cognitive mapping skills that rely upon the long-term memories of older individuals who may have traveled that same path decades earlier. Thus, family groups headed by older matriarchs are better able to survive periods of drought. These older matriarchs lead their families over larger areas during droughts than families headed by younger matriarchs, again drawing on their accrued knowledge, this time about the locations of permanent, drought resistant sources of food and water, to better lead and protect their families.

Studies reveal that long-term memories, and the decision-making mechanisms that rely on this knowledge, are severely disrupted in elephants who have experienced trauma or extreme disruption due to “management” practices initiated by humans. South African elephants who experienced trauma decades earlier showed significantly reduced social knowledge. As a result of archaic culling practices, these elephants had been forcibly separated from family members and subsequently taken to new locations. Two decades later, their social knowledge and skills and decision-making abilities were impoverished compared to an undisturbed Kenyan population. Disrupting elephants’ natural way of life has substantial negative impacts on their knowledge and decision-making abilities.

Elephants demonstrate advanced working memory skills. Working memory is the ability to temporarily store, recall, manipulate and coordinate items from memory. Working memory directs one’s attention to relevant information, utilized in reasoning, planning, coordination, and execution of cognitive processes through a “central executive.” Adult human working memory has a capacity of around seven items. When experiments were conducted with wild elephants in Kenya in which the locations of fresh urine samples from related or unrelated elephants were manipulated, the elephants responded by detecting urine from known individuals in surprising locations, thereby demonstrating the ability continually to track the locations of at least 17 family members in relation to themselves, as either absent, present in front of self, or present behind self. This remarkable ability to hold in mind and regularly update information about the locations and movements of a large number of family members is best explained by the fact that elephants possess an unusually large working memory capacity that is much larger than that of humans.

Elephants display a sophisticated categorization of their environment on par with humans. Bates, Byrne, Poole, and Moss experimentally presented the elephants of Amboseli National Park, Kenya with garments that gave olfactory or visual information about their human wearers, either Maasai warriors who traditionally attack and spear elephants as part of their rite of passage, or Kamba men who are agriculturalists and traditionally pose little threat to elephants. In the first experiment, the only thing that differed between the cloths was the smell, derived from the ethnicity and/or lifestyle of the wearers. The elephants were significantly more likely to run away when they sniffed cloths worn by Maasai men than those worn by Kamba men or no one at all. In a second experiment, they presented the elephants with two cloths that had not been worn by anyone; one was white (a neutral stimulus) and the other red, the color ritually worn by Maasai warriors. With access only to these visual cues, the elephants showed significantly greater, sometimes aggressive, reactions to red garments than white. They concluded that elephants are able to categorize a single species (humans) into sub-classes (i.e., “dangerous” or “low risk”) based on either olfactory or visual cues alone. McComb et al. further demonstrated that these same elephants distinguish human groups based on voices. The elephants reacted differently, and appropriately, depending on whether they heard Maasai or Kamba men speaking, and whether the speakers were male Maasai versus female Maasai, who also pose no threat. Scent, sounds and visual signs associated specifically with Maasai men are categorized as “dangerous,” while neutral signals are attended to but categorized as “low risk.” These sophisticated, multi-modal categorization skills may be exceptional among non-human animals and demonstrate elephants’ acute sensitivity to the human world and how they monitor human behavior and learn to recognize when we might cause them harm.

Human speech and language reflect autonomous thinking and intentional behavior. Similarly, elephants vocalize to share knowledge and information. Male elephants primarily communicate about their sexual status, rank and identity, whereas females and dependents emphasize and reinforce their social units. Call types are separated into those produced by the larynx (such as “rumbles”) and calls produced by the trunk (such as “trumpets”), with different calls in each category used in different contexts. Field experiments have shown that African elephants distinguish between call types. For example, such contact calls as “rumbles” may travel kilometers and maintain associations between elephants, or “oestrus rumbles” may occur after a female has copulated, and these call types elicit different responses in listeners.

Elephant vocalizations are not merely reflexive; they have distinct meanings to listeners and communicate in a manner similar to the way humans use language. Elephants display more than two hundred gestures, signals and postures that they use to communicate information to their audience. Such signals are adopted in many contexts, such as aggressive, sexual or socially integrative situations, are well-defined, carry a specific meaning both to the actor and recipient, result in predictable responses from the audience, and together demonstrate intentional and purposeful communication intended to share information and/or alter the others’ behavior to fit their own will. Elephants use specific calls and gestures to plan and discuss a course of action. These may be to respond to a threat through a group retreating or mobbing action (including celebration of successful efforts), or planning and discussing where, when and how to move to a new location. In group-defensive situations, elephants respond with highly coordinated behavior, both rapidly and predictably, to specific calls uttered and particular gestures exhibited by group members. These calls and gestures carry specific meanings not only to elephant listeners, but to experienced human listeners as well. The rapid, predictable and collective response of elephants to these calls and gestures indicates that elephants have the capacity to understand the goals and intentions of the signaling individual.

Elephant group defensive behavior is highly evolved and involves a range of different tactical maneuvers adopted by different elephants. For example, matriarch Provocadora’s contemplation of Poole’s team through listening and “j-sniffing,” followed by her purposeful “perpendicular-walk” (in relation to Poole’s team) toward her family and her “earflap-slide” clearly communicated that her family should begin a “group-advance” upon Poole’s team. This particular elephant attack is a powerful example of elephants’ use of empathy, coalition and cooperation. Provocadora’s instigation of the “group-advance” led to a two-and-a-half minute “group-charge” in which the three other large adult females of the 36-member family took turns leading the charge, passing the baton, in a sense, from one to the next. Once they succeeded in their goal of chasing Poole’s team away, they celebrated their victory by “high-fiving” with their trunks and engaging in an “end-zone-dance.” “High-fiving” is also typically used to initiate a coalition and is both preceded by and associated with other specific gestures and calls that lead to very goal oriented collective behavior.

Ostensive communication refers to the way humans use particular behavior, such as tone of speech, eye contact, and physical contact, to emphasize that a particular communication is important.90 Lead elephants in family groups use ostensive communication frequently as a way to say, “Heads up – I am about to do something that you should pay attention to.” In planning and communicating intentions regarding a movement, elephants use both vocal and gestural communication. For example, Poole has observed that a member of a family will use the axis of her body to point in the direction she wishes to go and then vocalize, every couple of minutes, with a specific call known as a “let’s-go” rumble, “I want to go this way, let’s go together.” The elephant will also use intention gestures — such as “foot-swinging” — to indicate her intention to move.94 Such a call may be successful or unsuccessful at moving the group or may lead to a 45-minute or longer discussion (a series of rumble exchanges known as “cadenced rumbles”) that researchers interpret as negotiation. Sometimes such negotiation leads to disagreement that may result in the group splitting and going in different directions for a period of time. In situations where the security of the group is at stake, such as when movement is planned through or near human settlement, all group members focus on the matriarch’s decision. So while “let’s go” rumbles are uttered, others adopt a “waiting” posture until the matriarch, after much “listening,” “j-sniffing,” and “monitoring,” decides it is safe to proceed, where upon they bunch together and move purposefully, and at a fast pace in a “group-march.”

Elephants typically move through dangerous habitat and nighttime hours at high speed in a clearly goal-oriented manner known as “streaking,” which has been described and documented through the movements of elephants wearing satellite tracking collars. The many different signals — calls, postures, gestures and behaviors elephants use to contemplate and initiate such movement (including “ear-flap,” “ear-flap-slide”) — are clearly understood by other elephants (just as they can be understood after long-term study by human observers), mean very specific things, and indicate that elephants: 1) have a particular plan which they can communicate with others, 2) can adjust their plan according to their immediate assessment of risk or opportunity, and 3) can communicate and execute the plan in a coordinated manner.

Elephants can vocally imitate sounds they hear, from the engines of passing trucks to the commands of human zookeepers. Imitating another’s behavior is demonstrative of a sense of self, as it is necessary to understand how one’s own behavior relates to the behavior of others. African elephants recognize the importance of visual attentiveness on the part of an intended recipient, elephant or human, and of gestural communication, which further demonstrates that elephants’ gestural communications are intentional and purposeful. This ability to understand the visual attentiveness and perspective of others is crucial for empathy, mental-state understanding, and “theory of mind,” the ability to mentally represent and think about the knowledge, beliefs and emotional states of others, while recognizing that these can be distinct from your own knowledge, beliefs and emotions.

As do humans, Asian elephants exhibit “mirror self-recognition” (MSR) using Gallup’s classic “mark test.” MSR is the ability to recognize a reflection in the mirror as oneself, while the mark test involves surreptitiously placing a colored mark on an individual’s forehead that she cannot see or be aware of without the aid of a mirror. If the individual uses the mirror to investigate the mark, the individual must recognize the reflection as herself. MSR is significant because it is a key identifier of self-awareness. Self-awareness is intimately related to autobiographical memory in humans and is central to autonomy and being able to direct one’s own behavior to achieve personal goals and desires. By demonstrating they can recognize themselves in a mirror, elephants must be holding a mental representation of themselves from another perspective and thus be aware that they are a separate entity from others.

One who understands the concept of dying and death must possess a sense of self. Elephants demonstrate an awareness of death by reacting to dead. Having a mental representation of the self, which is a pre-requisite for mirror-self recognition, likely confers an ability to comprehend death. Wild African elephants have been shown experimentally to be more interested in the bones of dead elephants than the bones of other animals. They have frequently been observed using their tusks, trunk or feet to attempt to lift sick, dying or dead individuals. Although they do not give up trying to lift or elicit movement from a dead body immediately, elephants appear to realize that once dead, the carcass can no longer be helped; and instead they engage in more “mournful” or “grief-stricken” behavior, such as standing guard over the body with dejected demeanor and protecting it from predators. Wild African elephants have been observed to cover the bodies of their dead with dirt and vegetation. Mothers who lose a calf may remain with the calf’s body for an extended period, but do not behave towards the body as they would a live calf. Indeed, the general demeanor of elephants attending to a dead elephant is one of grief and compassion, with slow movements and few vocalizations. These behaviors are akin to human responses to the death of a close relative or friend and demonstrate that elephants possess some understanding of life and the permanence of death. Elephants’ interest in the bodies, carcasses and bones of elephants who have passed is so marked that when one has died, trails to the site of death become worn into the ground by the repeated visits of many elephants over days, weeks, months, even years. The accumulation of dung around the site attests to the extended time that visiting elephants spend touching and contemplating the bones. Poole observed that, over years, the bones may become scattered over tens or hundreds of square meters as elephants pick up the bones and carry them away. The tusks are of particular interest and may be carried and deposited many hundreds of meters from the site of death.

The capacity for mentally representing the self as an individual entity has been linked to general empathic abilities. Empathy is defined as identifying with and understanding another’s experiences or feelings by relating personally to their situation. Empathy is an important component of human consciousness and autonomy and is a cornerstone of normal social interaction. It requires modeling the emotional states and desired goals that influence others’ behavior both in the past and future, and using this information to plan one’s own actions; empathy is only possible if one can adopt or imagine another’s perspective, and attribute emotions to that other individual. Thus, empathy is a component of “theory of mind.” Elephants frequently display empathy in the form of protection, comfort and consolation, as well as by actively helping those in difficulty, such as assisting injured individuals to stand and walk, or helping calves out of rivers or ditches with steep banks. Elephants have been seen to react when anticipating the pain of others by wincing when a nearby elephant stretched her trunk toward a live wire, and have been observed feeding those unable to use their own trunks to eat and attempting to feed those who have just died.

In an analysis of behavioral data collected from wild African elephants over a 40-year continuous field study, Bates and colleagues concluded that as well as possessing their own intentions, elephants can diagnose animacy and goal directedness in others, understand the physical competence and emotional state of others, and attribute goals and mental states (intentions) to others. This is borne out by examples such as: A family is crossing river. An infant struggles to climb out of bank after its mother. An adult female [not the mother] is standing next to calf and moves closer as the infant struggles. Female does not push calf out with its trunk, but digs her tusks into the mud behind the calf’s front right leg which acts to provide some anchorage for the calf, who then scrambles up and out and rejoins mother. At 11.10ish Ella gives a “lets go” rumble as she moves further down the swamp. At 11.19 Ella goes into the swamp. The entire group is in the swamp except Elspeth and her calf [<1 year] and Eudora [Elspeth’s mother]. At 11.25 Eudora appears to “lead” Elspeth and the calf to a good place to enter the swamp — the only place where there is no mud.

In addition to the examples analyzed in Bates et al., Poole observed two adult females rush to the side of a third female who had just given birth, back into her, and press their bodies to her in what appeared to be a spontaneous attempt to prevent injury to the newborn. In describing the situation, Poole wrote: “The elephants’ sounds [relating to the birth] also attracted the attention of several males including young and inexperienced, Ramon, who, picking up on the interesting smells of the mother [Ella], mounted her, his clumsy body and feet poised above the newborn. Matriarch Echo and her adult daughter Erin, rushed to Ella’s side and, I believe, purposefully backed into her in what appeared to be an attempt to prevent the male from landing on the baby when he dismounted. Such examples demonstrate that the acting elephant(s) (the adult female in the first example, Eudora in the second, and Erin and Echo in the third) were able to understand the intentions or situation of the other (the calf in the first case, Elspeth in the second, Ella’s newborn and the male in the third), and could adjust their own behavior to counteract the problem being faced by the other. In raw footage Poole acquired of elephant behavior filmed by her brother in the Mara, Kenya, an “allo-mother” (an elephant who cares for an infant and is not the infant’s mother or father) moves a log from under the head of an infant in what appears to be an effort to make him more comfortable.

In a further example of the ability to understand goal directedness of others, elephants appear to understand that vehicles drive on roads or tracks and they further appear to know where these tracks lead. In Gorongosa, Mozambique, where elephants exhibit a culture of aggression toward humans, charging, chasing and attacking vehicles, adult females anticipate the direction the vehicle will go and attempt to cut it off by taking shortcuts before the vehicle has begun to turn.

Empathic behavior begins early in elephants. In humans, rudimentary sympathy for others in distress has been recorded in infants as young as 10 months old; young elephants similarly exhibit sympathetic behavior. For example, during fieldwork in the Maasai Mara in 2011, Poole filmed a mother elephant using her trunk to assist her one-year-old female calf up a steep bank. Once the calf was safely up the bank she turned around to face her five-year-old sister, who was also having difficulties getting up the bank. As the older calf struggled to clamber up the bank the younger calf approached her and first touched her mouth (a gesture of reassurance among family members) and then reached her trunk out to touch the leg that had been having difficulty. Only when her sibling was safely up the bank did the calf turn to follow her mother.

Captive African elephants attribute intentions to others, as they follow and understand human pointing gestures. The elephants understood that the human experimenter was pointing to communicate information to them about the location of a hidden object. Attributing intentions and understanding another’s reference point is central to both empathy and “theory of mind.”

There is evidence of “natural pedagogy,” or true teaching — whereby a teacher takes into account the knowledge states of the learner as she passes on relevant information — in elephants. Bates, Byrne, and Moss’s analysis of simulated “oestrus behaviours” in African elephants — whereby a non-cycling, sexually experienced older female will simulate the visual signals of being sexually receptive, even though she is not ready to mate or breed again — demonstrates that these knowledgeable females can adopt false “oestrus behaviours” to demonstrate to naïve young females how to attract and respond appropriately to suitable males. Ostension is the way that we can “mark” our communications to show people that that is what they are. If you do something that another copies, that's imitation; but if you deliberately indicate what you are doing to be helpful, that's “ostensive” teaching. Similarly, we may “mark” a joke, hidden in seemingly innocent words; or “mark” our words as directed towards someone specific by catching their eye. Ostension implies that the signaler knows what she is doing. The experienced females may be taking the youngster’s lack of knowledge into account and actively showing them what to do — a possible example of true teaching as it is defined in humans. This evidence, coupled with the data showing they understand the ostensive cues in human pointing, suggests that elephants understand the intentions and knowledge states (minds) of others.

Coalitions and cooperation have been frequently documented in wild African elephants, particularly to defend family members or close allies from (potential) attacks by outsiders, such as when one family group tries to “kidnap” a calf from an unrelated family. These behaviors are generally preceded by gestural and vocal signals, typically given by the matriarch and acted upon by family members, and are based on one elephant understanding the emotions and goals of a coalition partner. Cooperation is evident in captive Asian elephants, who demonstrate they can work together in pairs to obtain a reward, but also understand the pointlessness of attempting the task if their partner was not present or could not access the equipment. Wild elephants have frequently been observed engaging in such cooperative problem-solving as retrieving calves kidnapped by other groups, helping calves out of steep, muddy river banks, rescuing a calf attacked by a lion (acoustic recording calling to elicit help from others), and navigating through human-dominated landscapes to reach a desired destination such as a habitat, salt-lick, or waterhole. These behaviors demonstrate the purposeful and well-coordinated social system of elephants and show that elephants can collectively hold specific aims in mind, then work together to achieve those goals. Such intentional, goal-directed action forms the foundation of independent agency, self-determination, and autonomy.

Elephants also show innovative problem-solving in experimental tests of insight, defined as the “a-ha” moment when a solution to a problem suddenly becomes clear. In cognitive psychology terms, “insight” is the ability to inspect and manipulate a mental representation of something, even when you can’t physically perceive or touch the something at the time. Simply, insight is using only thinking to solve problems. A juvenile male Asian elephant demonstrated such a spontaneous action by moving a plastic cube and standing on it to obtain previously out-of-reach food. After solving this problem once, he showed flexibility and generalization of the technique to other similar problems by using the same cube in different situations, or different objects in place of the cube when it was unavailable. This experiment demonstrates that elephants can choose an appropriate action and incorporate it into a sequence of behavior to achieve a goal they kept in mind throughout the process.

Asian elephants demonstrate the ability to understand goal-directed behavior. When presented with food that was out of reach, but with some bits resting on a tray that could be pulled within reach, elephants learned to pull only those trays baited with food. Success in this kind of “means-end” task demonstrates causal knowledge, which requires understanding not just that two events are associated with each other, but that some mediating force connects and affects the two which may be used to predict and control events. Understanding causation and inferring object relations may be related to understanding psychological causation, which is appreciation that others are animate beings who generate their own behavior and have mental states (e.g., intentions).