How Do Animals Recognize Their Own Species

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

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Dominique Faget/AFP via Getty Images

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

Dominique Faget/AFP via Getty Images

Daniel Povinelli was in loftier school when he outset read about a clever experiment, published in 1970, that showed chimpanzees—just 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 uncomplicated mirror, or then the story went, to reveal that our close chimpanzee relatives are self-aware, with the same kind of basic self-concept that humans have.

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

He ended up devoting years of his life to studying mirrors and higher-order consciousness. As a upshot, he now has a much unlike view on what animals may be doing as they study their own reflections—but says after a half-century, the public seems stuck on the scientific tale that drew him in equally a teenager.

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

The famous mirror self-recognition test was dreamed upward in the 1960'south by Gordon Gallup, Jr., a scientist at present with the Country University of New York at Albany. Back then, he was a graduate student taking a form in psychology, and i of the course assignments was to come with an idea for an experiment.

"And I plant myself shaving in front end of a mirror i solar day thinking nigh what I might suggest," says Gallup. "It occurred to me, every bit I was shaving in front end of the mirror, wouldn't it exist interesting to see if other creatures, other animals, could recognize themselves in mirrors?"

Standing in that location shaving, still looking at the mirror, he realized that he could test an creature by secretly marker its face up with some kind of non-irritating cherry dye, "to see if information technology could employ the mirror to then access and investigate these strange red marks."

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

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

When Gallup was able to actually showtime doing experiments with chimps, a few years later he came upwardly with his test, he institute that the chimps initially acted as if the mirror image were another animal. Only then, after a couple of days, their 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 blood-red dye on their faces, the chimps later woke up and reacted to the unexpected mirror epitome every bit if they understood that the marks were on their own faces.

"What they did was to accomplish up and touch and examine the marks on their faces that could only be seen in the mirror," explains Gallup.

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

Over the decades, researchers accept after 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'southward view, only three species accept consistently and convincingly demonstrated mirror self-recognition: chimpanzees, orangutans, and humans.

Others, though, think 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 1 experiment, her team made marks on dolphins' bodies. The animals could feel the marks being fabricated but could not see them. "And the idea was, Would they race to the mirror afterwards and orient immediately to the place where they've been marked?" explains Reiss, indicating that doing and so would indicate that dolphins could use the mirror every bit a tool to look at their bodies. "And that'south exactly what we found."

She notes that animals typically movement through a serial of distinct behavioral stages when they get-go encounter a mirror. Initially, they may think the prototype is another animal, or they will examine the mirror by looking behind information technology or under it. After that stage, some animals start to test the mirror by doing repetitive and unusual behaviors.

"I call up that's where the light seedling goes on," says Reiss. If animals realize that their body movements are linked to the movements in the mirror, they tin then potentially motion on to self-directed behavior, meaning they can offset to use the mirror every bit a tool to examine themselves.

"That last stage is the evidence that they're showing mirror self-recognition," she says, and Gallup'south mark test is a good fashion to ostend that. Only in her view the self-directed behavior should be sufficient.

After all, some animals may just non care about an experimental marker enough to bother with it. Elephants probably worry less about body cleanliness than primates, given that they sometimes bathe in mud and don't more often than not groom with their trunks. And then when an elephant sees a random mark on its caput, information technology may simply find the marker too insignificant and uninteresting to investigate further.

On the other manus, Gallup worries that without a articulate-cut experimental test, information technology'southward too like shooting fish in a barrel for researchers to meet whatever information technology is they desire to see as they motion-picture show an animal interacting with a mirror. "The problem with many of these videotapes, not simply of dolphins, but a diversity of other animals in forepart of mirrors," he says, "is that videotapes are kind of like Rorschach tests."

He believes that passing his marking test is strong evidence that an animal is self-aware—that it can become the object of its own attention. And, he says, this self-awareness was an evolutionary jump fabricated only by humans and their close relatives, 1 that and then led to empathy and higher-level thinking.

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

Simply Povinelli, who was once so entranced with Gallup's mirror exam that information technology made him devote much of his life to studying beast cognition, says that's reading mode, way too much into this one lab examination.

He believes the mirror exam reveals that chimpanzees accept some kind of self-concept, but non necessarily a 1000 psychological ane. Perhaps, he says, they may have a more sophisticated sense of their own body'due south movement and how it relates to the movements in the mirror.

With that kind of physical self-concept, a chimp could employ a mirror equally a tool to examine or groom its torso, he says, only that wouldn't indicate anything about the richness of the animal's inner life.

"With respect to the mirror test, the meg-dollar question virtually it is always: What is the chimp thinking well-nigh when it interacts with its ain mirror paradigm?" Povinelli says.

Later on all, humans can accept all kinds of complex thoughts about themselves as they brush their teeth or shave, he says, "but is that what's required? Practice I take to call up well-nigh any of that in order to brush my teeth in front 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, contempo research shows monkeys can actually learn to perform this feat, if they're given proper training.

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

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

This episode was edited past Gisele Grayson, produced by Thomas Lu, and fact-checked past Ariela Zebede. The audio 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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