Different in degree or kind: mirror test self awareness (Introduction)

by David Turell , Wednesday, December 12, 2018, 19:33 (2173 days ago) @ David Turell

The mirror has been used with many animals to see if there can be evidence of self-awareness. A few animals pass, and others are debated:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-self-aware-fish-raises-doubts-about-a-cognitive-test-2...

"Alex Jordan, an evolutionary biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Germany, thinks this fish — a cleaner wrasse — has just passed a classic test of self-recognition. Scientists have long thought that being able to recognize oneself in a mirror reveals some sort of self-awareness, and perhaps an awareness of others’ perspectives, too. For almost 50 years, they have been using mirrors to test animals for that capacity. After letting an animal get familiar with a mirror, they put a mark someplace on the animal’s body that it can see only in its reflection. If the animal looks in the mirror and then touches or examines the mark on its body, it passes the test.

"Humans don’t usually reach this milestone until we’re toddlers. Very few other species ever pass the test; those that do are mostly or entirely big-brained mammals such as chimpanzees.

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"The evolutionary psychologist Gordon Gallup thought up his field-defining experiment while shaving in a mirror one day as a graduate student. When Gallup took a position at Tulane University a little later, he had access to animals at the Delta Regional Primate Research Center he could test his idea on.

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" In their reflections, aquarium dolphins studied their eyes and mouths, did flips and blew different kinds of bubbles. After being drawn on with black marker, the dolphins spent more time looking at the marked sides of their bodies in the mirror.

"Monkeys, for the most part, have continued to fail mirror tests...But Reiss and her colleagues have found mirror self-recognition in Asian elephants. Orangutans, bonobos and gorillas have all passed the test, too, Reiss said — along with one bird, the magpie.

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"Jordan wants the world to know how smart fish can be. But, he said, “I am the last to say that fish are as smart as chimpanzees. Or that the cleaner wrasse is equivalent to an 18-month-old baby. It’s not.” Rather, he thinks the main point of his paper has more to do with science than fish: “The mirror test is probably not testing for self-awareness,” he said. The question then is what it is doing, and whether we can do better.

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"Scientists also have mixed feelings about the phrase “self-awareness,” for which they don’t agree on a definition. Reiss thinks the mirror test shows “one aspect of self-awareness,” as opposed to the whole cognitive package a human has. The biologists Marc Bekoff of the University of Colorado, Boulder, and Paul Sherman of Cornell University have suggested a spectrum of “self-cognizance” that ranges from brainless reflexes to a humanlike understanding of the self.

"Jordan likes the idea of a spectrum, and thinks cleaner wrasse would fall at the lower end of self-cognizance. He points out that moving your tail before it gets stepped on, or scraping a parasite off your scales, isn’t the same as sitting and pondering your place in the universe. Others in the field have supported his contention that the mirror test doesn’t test for self-awareness, he said. “I think the community wants a revision and a reevaluation of how we understand what animals know,” Jordan said.

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"Dogs are lousy at recognizing themselves in mirrors. But Horowitz recently designed an “olfactory mirror test” for dogs. She found that dogs spent longer sniffing samples of their own urine when it had an extra scent “mark” added to it."

Comment: My dog seems to recognize me in the mirror when I am at the mirror and gaze at him. He appears to look back at me with a fixed gaze toward the mirror. Long interesting article with many examples of other animals in experiments but only a few have very clear awareness of themselves. Many implications, no proof.