Ethological investigation of perceptual control, in addition to the responsibility to adopt the subject’s point of view, requires us to understand differences between what the subject animal can perceive and what we can, and between the means of control that it has and ours.
This research into elephants’ brains (popular summary here) also highlights differences between elephants of India and those of the African savannah. African elephants have two opposable fingers on the tips of their trunks with which they can grasp and manipulate things; Indian elephants have but one, and grasp things only as a serpent does by wrapping the trunk around it.
In light of my investigation of the cerebellar system, it is especially remarkable that their cerebellum “has 12 times as many neurons than expected for a mammal of its size.” If my surmise about its function providing I/O between atemporal levels is correct, this could reflect an expansion in the number of CVs at any level. Cetaceans have proportionally an even larger cerebellum, partly accounted for perhaps by the complexity of their acoustic environment, and elephants’ control of a great deal of information about terrain over very large territories may be some kind of corollary to that. Both kinds of animals are known to control complex social and kinship relationship perceptions.