I always thought the mirror test / mark test was a pretty well established test for self awareness, and several animals pass it. It's not particularly fringe.
Lots of animals pass mirror test, so we can safely assume that they are self-aware to some extent.
This method is believed to be highly imperfect though as not all animals rely on visual perception as their main info channel. So some animals that do not pass the test may be self-aware, we just don't know how to research it properly.
I don't think "self-aware" is the right way to summarize the results of these tests. One thing that this article doesn't say is that the mirror test is geared toward animals with good vision systems, and therefore is, to a large extent, testing spacial reasoning and visual acuity. Birds have great vision systems. It's necessary for flight, and also for picking out specks of food from a distance. A lot of mammals that are quite intelligent have poor vision -- like mustelids, for instance. The mirror test would make little sense for them.
There are other ways to be aware of your self besides through some complex optical phenomenon. For example, an animal might be aware of whether it can fit through that hole, jump up to that ledge, kill that enemy, or stand on that branch without breaking it. It might be aware of whether other creatures are able to see it inside its hideout, or if its cubs are hurt by its bite. "Self" is a rather broad and subtle thing.
I think an animal capable of self recognition may still fail the mirror test if visual sense is not their primary window to the world.
Take a hypothetical example, say we were presented with a non-visual smell mirror, would we pay it any attention, let alone recognize or identify ourselves in it ? Highly unlikely, on the other hand an animal like scent-hound might find such a thing interesting.
> I think an animal capable of self recognition may still fail the mirror test if visual sense is not their primary window to the world.
You first do the mirror test with many animals that do primarily use vision. Then you rank those using a different test - if you pick your alternate test properly it can act as a proxy to the mirror test.
Then you test your target animal to see how it does on the proxy test.
The mirror test is very flawed because it assumes other animals think ( or recognize ) like we do. We are mostly visual creatures so we create visual tests. But animals like cats are predominantly olfactory creatures. So if you planted smells of the cat, the cat would immediately recognize the smell as itself.
Imagine if cat psychologists created a test for humans. They would probably put your scent on one shirt and 9 other scents of other people on 9 different shirts and have you "recognize" yourself by picking out the shirt with your scent. Since we are visual creatures, we would fail such a test and the cat psychologists would claim that humans obviously have no self-aware. After all, how could a self-aware creature not recognize it's own scent.
That's how absurd the mirror test is. A mirror test for most animals would be like a smell test for humans. A cat might not recognize it's own reflection, but it will recognize its own scent. A human might not recognize our own scent, but we'll recognize our own reflection.
I recall reading an interesting theory on the mirror test: some animals for whom sight is a more secondary sense might fail a mirror test, but could potentially self-identify using other senses.
Take dogs for example: their sense of smell is much much more primary than their sense of sight. So while they may fail a mirror test, they may be more adept at self-identification by scent.
There are a lot of steps not related to self-awareness involved in investigating oneself in a mirror. For example, with the "spot" test, the animal has to:
1) Be interested enough in the reflection to watch it long enough to see the spot
2) Be observant enough to notice the spot
3) Be curious enough to care about the spot
4) Understand that the animal in the mirror is itself
5) Collapse the logical chain that: (a) if the animal in the mirror has a spot, and (b) the animal in the mirror is itself, then therefore (c) it has a spot.
6) Think to use the mirror as a tool for investigation.
An animal could plausibly get (4) without getting enough of the other steps to actually start investigating. To me, (5) seems like the most difficult leap of intelligence of all of these, and it doesn't really have to do with self-awareness-- it's more about complex inference and logical reasoning. (6) also suggests that the capability for tool use might be a prerequisite.
Most cat owners understand (including other posters in this thread) that cats know the difference between their own reflection and another real cat seen through a window. Disinterest is one explanation (though that doesn't happen with actual cats in a window), but I don't think cats' failure in the "spot" experiment is enough to exclude that they are indeed capable of (4).
On top of that, I don't think this experiment says anything at all about the nature or presence of "consciousness".
It's not an assumption. Self awareness has been scientifically tested in many species, most prominently by using the mirror test: testing if an animal can recognize itself in a mirror by observing if its behavior changes after surreptitiously placing onto its body a mark, which the animal can only see through the mirror. One can argue about the merits of the mirror test, but it's inaccurate to say that scientists are merely making assumptions. They're doing their best to rigorously test self awareness.
This is an anecdotal story, but has made me feel weird about this test in general.
I have a cat (who do not pass the mirror test) who loves mirrors. She just likes looking at herself in them. It is weird. She also frequently walks in on me in the bathroom and frequently looks at me through the mirror. And I know she looks at that one because it is the one I look at her with. So it always has made me feel like this test may be doing something else, because she clearly recognizes that I'm not in the mirror, but that she can see me with it. So it seems like she understands what a reflection is, but not her self in the reflection.
So it seems that animals can understand reflections, but does that really mean they recognize a self if they recognize themselves in it? IDK, I'm not a biologist and may be missing a lot from this test.
Reminds me of a similar test with dogs. By default, they didn't do well at the mirror test, but then scientists wondered whether they were simply more focused on smell rather than sight. So they came up with a smell based version of the same test, which the dogs passed.
The point is that awareness testing is not a fringe part of animal behavioral studies. This would be a potential area of research for mainstream animal behavior study (paired mirror tests).
I'm referring to the "Sniff test of self-recognition" (STSR), which has been proposed by Gatti in [Gat16] and run on a very small sample of dogs. Horowitz has proposed another testing method, derived from STSR, in [Hor17]. [Hor17] has been criticized by Gallup et al. in [Gal18] for lacking evidence according to their framework of self-awareness (dogs need to sniff on themselves after exposure to their own scent). But the authors agree that the "olfactory mirror" test is a valid extension of the "mirror test", a self-awareness test based on visual clues. Gatti has shared some of the criticism recently [Gat18], but attributes the lack of evidence to formal problems, namely [Hor17] failing to cite important aspects of his original work in [Gat16]. And indeed, while [Gal18] cites [Hor17], and [Hor17] cites [Gat16], [Gal18] makes no mention of results by Gatti in [Gat16], which would support their framework: "[...] when released together inside the enclosure and left free to move and interact with each other and with the five samples, the four dogs repetitively sniffed the excretory organs of the others and the containers, sometimes stopping to sniff themselves."
I'm no expert, so I don't want to make any strong assertions here. But it seems that only recently, alternative self-awareness testing procedures (to the "mirror test") have become acceptable by researchers. Now new tests will be designed, and there is a body of evidence to be gathered for each of those tests. I personally believe that, given that the defense of human exclusivity for cognitive features has been a running fight, self-awareness will eventually suffer a similar fate.
[Gat16] Cazzolla Gatti, Roberto. Self-consciousness: beyond the looking-glass and what dogs found there. Ethology Ecology & Evolution, 2016
[Hor17] Alexandra Horowitz. Smelling themselves: Dogs investigate their own odours longer when modified in an "olfactory mirror" test. Behavioural Processes, 2017
[Gal18] Gordon G. Gallup Jr. & James R. Anderson. The "olfactory mirror" and other recent attempts to demonstrate self-recognition in non-primate species. Behavioural Processes, 2018
Understanding how to track others in mirrors is one thing -- understanding with clarity that the cat in the mirror is them, is actually another.
The mirror dot test (which I imagine needs to be done really carefully with cats since they instinctively clean their own faces and necks, and have sensitive whiskers) shows whether the animal fully understands that the reflection is specifically of them, and can use that reflection to solve a puzzle.
I have said elsewhere that it's kind of just about possible for the ears-in-the-mirror cat to not understand the mirror cat is herself, but it is an increasingly implausible alternative.
The mirror dot test may have its limitations on a species basis, but it is not easy to come up with a universal test.
There are many animals (including many mammals) that don't recognize themselves in mirrors, and are therefore usually assumed not to have self awareness.
It'd be weird to me if they didn't have qualitative experiences though.
Empathy is exactly where my thoughts led when trying to see how robust these tests really are. Watching the embedded video though, I think there's a strong case that elephants are definitively shown to understand that what's in the mirror is really them. Notice how the shot of one elephant shows that it has turned away from the mirror intent on washing away the mark around its own eye. It seems to knock down the empathy argument.
An interesting aspect of the mirror test is what happens with multiple animals. Presumably it's well established that various types of animals recognize each other—that they associate identities with others. So when two bonobos (say) show up in front of a large mirror, surely they will recognize that one of the bonobos they're seeing in the mirror is the same as they one at its side. Bonobos and other apes are convincingly argued to be able to understand what's going on, so not that revealing. But what about dogs, for example, which certainly have some concept of identity in others, but somehow seem to fail the mirror test? And what about cross-species recognition? A dog seeing a familiar cat or human?
A more convincing mirror test, I think, would be if you can silently introduce another animal to appear behind the one being tested. An animal that takes note of a predator or prey in the mirror (or opponent or friend) and then turns around to respond accordingly surely understands the implications of what's going on in the mirror.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_test
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