Resume Reading — What Do Animals See in a Mirror?


What Do Animals See in a Mirror?







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Explore the self-awareness of your kid, puppy, or parakeet at home. Reactions vary according to your subject. Place a big, colorful sticker in a baby’s hair away from a mirror, making sure the baby doesn’t notice or feel it. Then take the baby to a mirror. The baby may point at the sticker, but they don’t realize that it’s on their own face staring back at them. When you remove it and show it to them, they’ll be surprised.

 By the time the baby is 2 years old, however, it will undergo a cognitive shift in self-awareness, and easily use the mirror to locate the sticker. Puppies and kittens aren’t so impressed with stickers, but often play with the image in the mirror that they do not recognize as their own reflection. Older dogs and cats tend to ignore their reflections, possibly because they have lost interest.

Moshe Blank





For Reiss and Marino, the dolphin study was not only convincing, it was a call to action. They and others argue that passing the mirror test indicates a level of self-awareness that makes it unethical to keep a species in captivity. “These animals have at least some level of self-awareness, and if they do, they know where they are, they can be aware of the limitations of their physical environment,” Marino says. She is now the science director for the Nonhuman Rights Project, which is attempting to gain legal rights for animals with higher-order cognitive abilities by getting courts to recognize them as “legal persons,” and Reiss advocates for dolphin protection. Key to their arguments is the scientific evidence that chimps, elephants, cetaceans, and other animals are self-aware like humans. Not only can they suffer, but they can think to themselves, I am suffering.

Gallup, now in his 70s, mainly stays away from advocacy work but he likes to philosophize about what exactly mirror self-recognition shows, and why that capability might have evolved. Clearly, it has little to do with mirrors since aside from the occasional still pond, our distant ancestors would never have encountered their reflections. He’s come to the conclusion that a pass of the mirror test indicates a profound level of consciousness that includes animals’ ability to contemplate their own thoughts and experiences as well as to imagine what others could be thinking and experiencing. This ability is called “theory of mind.”

For support, he points to the fact that children start to demonstrate theory of mind at roughly around the same time that they start to recognize themselves in the mirror. “You have to be aware of yourself in the first place in order to begin to take into account what other people may know, want, or intend to do,” he says. He notes that people with schizophrenia often cannot recognize themselves in the mirror, and they struggle with theory of mind as well. For example, compared to controls, schizophrenic individuals were less likely to understand a request hidden in a husband’s statement to his wife, “I want to wear that blue shirt, but it’s very creased.”

Povinelli calls this reasoning “folk psychology”—unscientific inferences made based on our own human experiences.

Gallup suggests that a powerful sense of self may have evolved because it helped great apes deal with complex social situations. “Intellectual prowess supplanted physical prowess as a means of achieving dominance,” he says. And, he suggests that strong self-awareness may also entail death-awareness. “The next step, it seems to me logically, is to confront and eventually grapple with the inevitability of your own individual demise,” he says.

As for why dolphins and other non-primates recognize themselves in mirrors, Gallup isn’t yet convinced they do. He suggests an alternative explanation for why his former student’s dolphins wriggled in the mirror: to see marks on what they perceived as another dolphin peering back at them. And he requires replication of recent studies finding that elephants use their trunks to touch white crosses on their foreheads, and magpies dislodge stickers on their chests with their beaks.

Then there are researchers who discount whether the mirror test says anything about theory of mind in any animal, including humans. Most notably, Gallup’s mentee, Daniel Povinelli. Like a son who witnesses his father’s foibles and decides to become his opposite, Povinelli, now at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette, has become one Gallup’s most outspoken critics, even as they remain close on a personal level. He’s come to believe that a chimp doesn’t need to have an integrated sense of self in order to pass the mirror test. Instead, it needs only to notice that the body in the mirror looks and moves the same as its own body, and then make the connection that if there’s a spot on the body in the mirror, there could also be a spot on its own body. That ability would still be pretty sophisticated, Povinelli adds, and it might reflect a keen awareness of the position of body parts that would likely be very helpful for swinging through trees. Indeed, he speculates that this high-level physical self-awareness may have developed when our tree-dwelling ancestors increased in size and faced more challenges while navigating their branchy, leafy world.

Povinelli’s concerns stretch to other landmark studies on theory of mind in chimps, such as those that document how a subordinate chimp refrained from hidden food when she watched a dominant chimp see researchers hide the food. The authors of this study argued that this was because the subordinate chimp reasoned about what the dominant chimp had seen and what it would do. Combined with results from other experiments, they concluded that chimps can “understand both the goals and intentions of others as well as the perception and knowledge of others,” and they can predict the action that will result.

But Povinelli calls this reasoning “folk psychology”—unscientific inferences made based on our own human experiences. The subordinate chimp doesn’t have to know the dominant’s mind, he says, all she has to know is to avoid interfering with the dominant chimp.

To apply Povinelli’s logic to humans, we may think deep, reflective thoughts when using a mirror to brush our teeth, but that doesn’t mean that the part of the brain that’s using the mirror to direct our toothbrush is the same part of the brain that’s contemplating the self. Those two abilities may develop at the same time in children, but that does not mean that they’re related, much less one and the same. 

Povinelli’s critiques aside, most comparative psychologists say there’s something to mirror recognition, not least because it’s only been observed in intellectually superior animals. Neuroscientists are now trying to shed light on the matter by searching for a physical basis for the ability in the brain. Although they haven’t found a clear signal yet, Gallup remains undeterred. After nearly 45 years of fending off challengers, he is not likely to wake up in the morning, look in the mirror, and change his mind.

Chelsea Wald is a freelance science writer who contributes to Science and Nature. She lives with her reflection in Vienna, Austria.

Dolphin clip courtesy of Diana Reiss
Kitten clip originally from Kayley D.
Puppy clip originally from John E. Lester
Baboon clip originally from Srinivas Kumar
Magpie clip originally from Helmut Prior, Ariane Schwarz, & Onur Güntürkün
Chimpanzee and gibbon clips originally from Thomas Suddendorf

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