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why-animals-do-the-thing:

south-adversary:

why-animals-do-the-thing:

kroganwhisperer:

@why-animals-do-the-thing ????

Cats don’t pass the mirror-dot test – that is, they haven’t been found in studies to recognize that they are the animal in the mirror. Animals that do make that connection will try to remove a colored dot placed by scientists where it is only visible in the mirror. It’s probable this cat is trying to interact with / get to the other cat in the mirror.

Just curious, @why-animals-do-the-thing what do you think about the mirror test in general? I’ve always had my doubts about the validity of it.

Do we know which animals would even care that there is a colored dot on their head? It seems like a level of anthropomorphizing, because obviously we would care about a dot on our forehead.

Just a thought question.

Good question, and you actually hit the nail on the head!

The mirror test was originally supposed to ‘show’ that an animal was self-aware if it examined the mark on it’s body. Ideally, recognizing the animal in the mirror is not a stranger and that it is the animal undergoing the test shows an understanding of the concepts of ‘self’ and ‘other’. Then they’re supposed to see the mark in the mirror, realize it’s on their own body, and then interact with it on their own body somehow. I think that’s less anthropomorphizing as anticipating that most animals will investigate or groom away something they don’t expect to be on their body. 

All in all, it’s not a great test and there’s a lot of problems with it in both humans and non-humans. Animals known to have passed it include chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans, dolphins, elephants, and humans – but most gorillas haven’t (Koko was the exception). It doesn’t make much sense that one type of ape would pass but not another, except until you think about behavioral differences between the species – gorillas find eye contact to be very threatening much of the time and avoid looking each other in the face, so a gorilla given a mirror is less likely to look at “another gorilla’s”face long enough to realize that it’s their own. Interestingly enough, a scientific american article also mentions that:

“Gorillas are easily embarrassed. (…) Instead of messing with the mark in front of the mirror, they would sometimes go away, hide in a corner, and wipe the mark off there. Gorillas got what was going on, they just didn’t respond the way we thought they should.”

Kids from different human cultures don’t even reliably pass the test at the same age, and it seems to have a lot to do with cultural upbringings. 

There’s a lot of debate about what, if any, validity the results have and what sort of interaction with the reflection in the mirror and/or the mark counts as a valid pass. There’s thought that a freeze reaction is still a recognition behavior, or that repetitive motion in front of the mirror while watching the mirror (but not interacting with the mark) could also count. 

I’ll let the article from above summarize, because it’s eloquent.

“There are two things we should take away from this. First, self-awareness is not a hard and fast line. Instead, it is probably a continuum. That is an especially important lesson to keep in mind with animal research. A species might have the skill, even if some individuals do not. This is true for chimpanzees, who do not all pass the mark test, and can lose the ability as they age. Linked concepts, like empathy, exist in species and individuals that are not able to pass a mark test. Rats, for instance, do not pass the mark but still engage in some limited empathetic behaviors. And passing the test does not mean an individual has self-awareness, or mirrors, all figured out. After all, it is not uncommon to see a human child pass a mark test and then immediately look behind the mirror, as though not quite getting what it is. 

Second, the mark test itself is not the end all and be all of self-awareness.“Self-awareness is like gravity,” Johns Hopkins’s Roma says. “We can’t touch it directly, so if we want to measure it, scientists must develop valid techniques to directly observe its effects. Currently, mirror mark tests are the best-known and most accepted method, but the absence of an effect does not necessarily mean the absence of the thing we’re trying to measure. Ultimately, evidence from multiple techniques should converge on the truth, whatever it may be. Such is the beauty of how scientific advances turn controversy into common knowledge.““