If you give an elephant an apple, she’s going to want some more. But how can she get through to the nearby humans who are keeping those luscious treats away from her?

After working with elephants in Zimbabwe, researchers reported that the animals are capable of making very deliberate gestures to communicate that desire for more. Their study was published Wednesday in the journal Royal Society Open Science.

In the study of the evolution of language and other forms of communication, researchers have long been interested in whether nonhuman animals use gestures. That’s because gestures can reveal to what extent individuals are aware of the attention and inner state of others. Identifying creatures that use movement to elicit behavior from others can help reveal how and when, in the family tree of life, complex communication evolved.

Many studies about gestures focus on primates. But elephants are another natural subject for this research because they live in groups and have elaborate social lives. Perhaps they, too, use movement to communicate.

To understand the research, think of how humans get others to do what they want. Vesta Eleuteri, a researcher at the University of Vienna and the study’s lead author, explained how she might signal to a friend non-verbally to pass her a bottle of water.

“I first check if you are looking at me,” she said. “If you are looking at me, I might point at the bottle.” After that signal, “I wait for you to react. If you don’t react, I persist. I might reach toward the bottle, I might wave toward the bottle. Once you give me the bottle, I stop gesturing.”

These steps — checking for an audience, signaling, continuing to signal in different ways if the first signal doesn’t get through, and stopping the signaling once the goal is achieved — are all hallmarks of intentionally using gesture to induce others to act.

To see what elephants might do in a similar situation, researchers stood in front of the creatures with two trays. One tray was empty; the other had six apples, a favorite treat (earlier plans to use watermelons were abandoned after the researchers, after pushing six carts of melons through the checkout lane, deemed them impractical).

When there was no human audience, the elephants did not gesture, similar to captive apes in previous research. As the researchers faced the animals, though, conspicuously paying attention, the elephants began to move. One of them, Moka, waggled his trunk toward the apples.

Another time, Moka reached his trunk toward the experimenter.

The experimenters responded in different ways: Sometimes they gave the elephants only three apples, leaving three on the tray. When that happened, Moka and other elephants persisted in signaling, as captive apes do in such a scenario, swinging their trunks.

In all, the researchers identified 38 types of gestures that the elephants used for this kind of signaling.

Richard Byrne, who studies the evolution of cognition at the University of St. Andrews in Edinburgh and was not involved in the study, wrote in an email that “There’s no doubt that the elephants were using their gestures intentionally.” He added that the gestures are comparable to the communication styles of humans and apes, “in which signalers use gestures to achieve specific goals by manipulating specific target audiences.”

But he noted one significant difference: When the elephants were given only an empty tray, they didn’t signal as much as they had before. Great apes, he and his colleagues have found in their work, would have increased their signaling for the apples.

That discrepancy between apes and elephants suggests the elephants might not have understood what was going on in the mind of the experimenters who gave them nothing, Dr. Byrne said. They didn’t redouble their efforts to get the humans to understand.

They did seem to be trying some different signals when they got nothing, though, Dr. Eleuteri said, and Mickey Pardo, a behavioral ecologist at Cornell University who was not involved in the study, also noted this fact as significant.

Dr. Eleuteri said she wonders whether the more muted reply in this scenario might have resulted from the way these elephants live. They wander freely in a tourist area during the days but spend nights in a barn, and have been taught not to beg humans for food. “They might be thinking, maybe I’m not allowed to get these apples?” she speculated.

Further work with wild animals will be required, Dr. Eleuteri said. She is currently analyzing videos of wild elephants in social contexts, piecing together how they influence each other through movement.

“They are very complex, socially,” she said.

It’s a project that will take many years, but she hopes it will help illuminate how these creatures’ minds work, giving insight into how body movements function as communication.