Which One Of These Animals Can Recognize Itself In A Mirror?

A macaques monkey looking into the mirror of a motorbike in the grounds of a temple in Jaipur in the Indian state of Rajasthan. Dominique Faget/AFP via Getty Images hide explanation

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Dominique Faget/AFP via Getty Images

A macaques monkey looking into the mirror of a motorcycle in the grounds of a temple in Jaipur in the Indian state of Rajasthan.

Dominique Faget/AFP via Getty Images

Daniel Povinelli was in high school when he first read near a clever experiment, published in 1970, that showed chimpanzees—but not monkeys--can recognize themselves in mirrors.

"I bought into the story of mirrors and cocky-recognition hook, line, and sinker," he recalls. "Because it is a compelling story."

All it took was a elementary mirror, or then the story went, to reveal that our shut chimpanzee relatives are self-aware, with the same kind of basic cocky-concept that humans take.

"The idea that in that location are other creatures out in that location for whom we can only access their mental states, their self-consciousness, through the trick of a mirror was somehow simply deeply inviting," recalls Povinelli, at present a scientist with the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

He concluded up devoting years of his life to studying mirrors and college-guild consciousness. As a result, he now has a much different view on what animals may be doing as they report their own reflections—simply says afterwards a one-half-century, the public seems stuck on the scientific tale that drew him in as a teenager.

"If I had a dollar for every time a reporter had called me over the concluding xxx years wanting to do a story most mirrors and chimps and monkeys and whatever," says Povinelli, "I would have a one thousand thousand dollars."

The famous mirror self-recognition test was dreamed upwards in the 1960'south past Gordon Gallup, Jr., a scientist now with the State Academy of New York at Albany. Dorsum and so, he was a graduate student taking a course in psychology, and one of the class assignments was to come up with an idea for an experiment.

"And I plant myself shaving in front of a mirror ane mean solar day thinking about what I might propose," says Gallup. "It occurred to me, as I was shaving in front end of the mirror, wouldn't it be interesting to see if other creatures, other animals, could recognize themselves in mirrors?"

Standing there shaving, still looking at the mirror, he realized that he could test an animal by secretly marker its confront with some kind of not-irritating carmine dye, "to meet if it could use the mirror to and then access and investigate these foreign red marks."

No such examination had been washed before, fifty-fifty though people had long observed animals interacting with mirrors. Most species tend to treat a mirror image as a stranger to exist courted or attacked, says Gallup, who notes that "parakeets will literally interact with themselves in mirrors as though they were seeing another parakeet for their entire lives."

Some scientists suspected that primates, however, might do improve. Even Charles Darwin once watched, fascinated, as a captive orangutan named Jenny made faces at a mirror.

When Gallup was able to actually get-go doing experiments with chimps, a few years after he came up with his test, he found that the chimps initially acted as if the mirror image were another animal. But then, later on a couple of days, their mental attitude shifted. The chimps began using the mirror to examine parts of their bodies like their teeth or genitals.

When Gallup anesthetized them and put red dye on their faces, the chimps later woke upwards and reacted to the unexpected mirror image as if they understood that the marks were on their ain faces.

"What they did was to reach upwards and affect and examine the marks on their faces that could only exist seen in the mirror," explains Gallup.

News of his findings caused a sensation. "It had quite an touch—much, much greater impact than I predictable," Gallup says.

Over the decades, researchers have subsequently tried his mirror self-recognition experiment, or slight variations, in a slew of other species—everything from magpies to ants to manta rays.

In Gallup's view, only iii species accept consistently and convincingly demonstrated mirror self-recognition: chimpanzees, orangutans, and humans.

Others, though, retrieve the list is longer. Diana Reiss, a cognitive psychologist and marine mammal scientist at Hunter College, has tested both dolphins and elephants and believes that both show signs of recognizing themselves in mirrors.

In one experiment, her squad made marks on dolphins' bodies. The animals could feel the marks being made merely could not see them. "And the thought was, Would they race to the mirror afterwards and orient immediately to the place where they've been marked?" explains Reiss, indicating that doing so would indicate that dolphins could apply the mirror equally a tool to wait at their bodies. "And that's exactly what we found."

She notes that animals typically move through a series of singled-out behavioral stages when they starting time encounter a mirror. Initially, they may call back the image is some other animal, or they will examine the mirror past looking backside it or nether it. After that phase, some animals start to examination the mirror by doing repetitive and unusual behaviors.

"I call back that's where the calorie-free bulb goes on," says Reiss. If animals realize that their body movements are linked to the movements in the mirror, they can and so potentially movement on to cocky-directed behavior, meaning they can start to use the mirror as a tool to examine themselves.

"That terminal stage is the testify that they're showing mirror self-recognition," she says, and Gallup'southward mark examination is a skillful fashion to ostend that. Merely in her view the self-directed behavior should exist sufficient.

After all, some animals may just not care about an experimental mark enough to bother with information technology. Elephants probably worry less nearly body cleanliness than primates, given that they sometimes breast-stroke in mud and don't mostly groom with their trunks. And so when an elephant sees a random mark on its head, it may simply detect the mark too insignificant and uninteresting to investigate further.

On the other hand, Gallup worries that without a clear-cut experimental test, information technology's likewise piece of cake for researchers to come across whatever information technology is they want to see every bit they film an animal interacting with a mirror. "The problem with many of these videotapes, non only of dolphins, merely a diversity of other animals in front end of mirrors," he says, "is that videotapes are kind of like Rorschach tests."

He believes that passing his marking test is potent evidence that an animal is cocky-enlightened—that it can become the object of its own attending. And, he says, this self-sensation was an evolutionary spring made only by humans and their close relatives, one that then led to empathy and higher-level thinking.

"In one case you acquire to recognize yourself in the mirror and become the object of your ain experience, you're then in the position, at to the lowest degree in principle, to apply your experience to make inferences about comparable experiences in other creatures," says Gallup.

But Povinelli, who was once so entranced with Gallup's mirror test that it made him devote much of his life to studying animal cognition, says that'south reading way, manner too much into this one lab exam.

He believes the mirror test reveals that chimpanzees have some kind of self-concept, but not necessarily a grand psychological one. Perhaps, he says, they may have a more than sophisticated sense of their own body's movement and how information technology relates to the movements in the mirror.

With that kind of physical cocky-concept, a chimp could use a mirror every bit a tool to examine or groom its body, he says, simply that wouldn't indicate annihilation about the richness of the animal's inner life.

"With respect to the mirror test, the million-dollar question about it is e'er: What is the chimp thinking about when it interacts with its own mirror image?" Povinelli says.

After all, humans can have all kinds of complex thoughts about themselves equally they castor their teeth or shave, he says, "but is that what'due south required? Do I have to think virtually whatsoever of that in order to castor my teeth in front end of the mirror?"

And while it's true that monkeys, unlike chimps, can live with mirrors for years without spontaneously showing signs that they recognize their own reflections, recent enquiry shows monkeys can really learn to perform this feat, if they're given proper grooming.

He says people live with cats and dogs and other animals all the time and tend to project our own understanding of the globe onto them, but we can't straight interview them to ask what they're experiencing.

"And then when a exam comes along that is dressed up in scientific garb similar a mirror so a mark and we're in a scientific laboratory," Povinelli says, "we immediately want to bespeak to this as confirmation of what we thought we knew all forth."

This episode was edited by Gisele Grayson, produced by Thomas Lu, and fact-checked by Ariela Zebede. The sound engineer for this episode was Josh Newell.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2020/12/17/947552020/mirror-mirror-on-the-wall-can-you-reveal-an-animals-inner-world-at-all

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