Meanwhile, de Waal argues that ‘all animals need a self-concept’. Monkeys, for instance, must know their own weight before leaping onto a tree branch, and be aware of their physical fitness and strength before fighting another monkey. And most – perhaps all – animals need to know something about themselves, their fellows, and their role in their societies in order to get along. Perhaps it’s time, de Waal suggests, to find tests that don’t rely solely on vision to investigate other animals’ self-awareness. It’s a ‘gross simplification to lump all animals’ that fail the mirror test into a ‘single cognitive category’ when they respond so differently to mirrors, he adds. Small-brained birds, such as robins, will repeatedly attack their reflected , unable to let go of the notion that it’s an invader; while cats and dogs typically choose to ignore the stranger in the mirror, and others, notably monkeys and African grey parrots, can use mirrors to find objects that are out of sight. Nor do all monkeys treat their reflections as strangers. There is an as-yet unrecognised continuum to the MSR test, and it would make sense to investigate this, says de Waal, instead of looking at it simply as a pass-fail exam.
Many animals behave in a similar manner the first time they see themselves in a mirror. Some cat owners have videoed their pets leaping away in wide-eyed alarm, even doing back flips, after spotting their reflections. Monkeys, chimpanzees and many species of birds all initially interpret their mirror as a stranger, and respond by attacking or threatening it. Even human children under the age of two don’t initially recognise their reflections; like most other species, they react as if seeing another child, one who seems bent on playing a novel form of hide-and-seek. But, at least for most children raised in Western societies, something changes at about age two, and they begin to understand that they are looking at themselves. (It helps that their parents likely often hold them in front of mirrors, playfully asking: ‘Who is that? … That’s you!’) At this age, neuropsychologists say that the structure and function of children’s prefrontal cortex also begins to mature, and they begin to perceive the ‘self’ as a separate being. Two-year-old toddlers also begin to use personal pronouns, play self-consciously, and smile when they succeed at solving challenging tasks – all signs that they are becoming self-aware.
Indeed, Marino breaks with Gallup when animals don’t pass the test: she doesn’t think it means they lack self-awareness. All animals, she argues, are self-aware: ‘We just don’t know what it means to be self-aware and not pass the mirror test.’ And so until other tests of self-awareness that are appropriate for more species are devised, we are stuck with the one that works – and at least for us, adds de Waal, the mirror tests ‘are fun’.
‘The mirror test was never ideal or wholly adequate; it’s just our best attempt so far,’ agrees Alexandra Horowitz, an animal cognition scientist at Barnard College in New York, who considers it a very ‘human or primate-centric test’ designed for animals that rely heavily on vision. ‘To find out what’s really going on in an animal’s mind, you have to consider their naturalistic behaviours and what’s important to them,’ she explains. ‘For dogs, that would be scent. They learn about other dogs by smelling their rear ends, so I took the key elements from Gallup’s test and adjusted it for dogs.’ Her ‘sniff test of self-recognition’ used ‘olfactory mirrors’ to see if dogs recognised themselves. In this test, dogs were allowed to sniff urine placed in containers. Some containers held only the dog’s urine; others had that dog’s urine mixed with another’s. Dogs spent more time sniffing the mixtures – a sign, Horowitz says, that they knew what they should smell like, just as we know what we should look like when we gaze in a mirror.
When our collie, Buckaroo, was four months old, he began barking at his reflection in our glass patio door every evening, doing his best to alert us to this unknown, bold little pup outside. Of course, the reflected dog didn’t back away, so Buck lunged at him and scratched the door jamb – actions that did get our attention. We would pull him away, laughing, and tell him he was wrong – a dog wasn’t on our deck. Buck studied our faces with a perplexed expression. Anyone could see the dog was still there. Why didn’t we chase it away? Sometimes, we opened the door to show him he was mistaken. Of course, as soon as we closed it, the strange dog reappeared. The reflected dog also had the irritating habit of mirroring all of Buck’s actions. In other situations with new dogs, Buck would have made a series of welcoming gestures, perhaps wagging his tail, rolling his eyes and making deep play bows. We never saw him make a single attempt to befriend this ‘Now I’m here; now I’m not’ canine. He tried only to make him go away.
In the past, dogs have been tested for their sense of self-awareness through methods that the researchers thought were not “ecologically relevant.” Dogs fail to recognize themselves in the mirror mark test, for example, in which scientists place a visible mark on an animals face to see whether they will investigate it in a mirror. Other species, like elephants and great apes, are mirror-mark-test masters, Live Science reports.
“For a dog, being aware of how big is the body, or how the body can be an obstacle, its reasonable to expect. This is an animal with a complex nervous system, its an intelligent animal, its a fast-moving animal. . . . If you think about how dogs eat, you can imagine that a dog often has to hold down a bigger chunk of food, lets say, and use its own body as a counterweight to be able to take off meat from a bone or whatever. So, this is an appropriate context to test this cognitive capacity,” Pongrácz tells The Scientist. Recommended Videos Most Popular
Adapting experimental methods from studies of body awareness in elephants and toddlers, the researchers tested 32 dogs of different breeds and sizes on their ability to recognize their body as an obstacle. In the problem-solving experiment, the canines had to grab a toy that was attached to a mat they were sitting on. If the dogs demonstrated body awareness, they knew they needed to get off the mat to complete the task and give the toy to their owners, reports Live Science. The experimental conditions were then compared to control groups in which the toy was attached to the ground or wasnt attached to anything at all, reports Science Alert.
In a new study, canines recognized how their bodies took up space and moved to complete a task
Although dogs cant identify themselves in the mirror, they still have some level of self-awareness and ace other self-recognition tests. They can recognize their own odor, and recall memories of specific events, Earth.com reports. This past evidence led the researchers to suspect canines show a lower level of self-representation that can only be observed in simpler tests that focus on their body and environment, explains Pongrácz to Catherine Offord in an interview with The Scientist.
In 2021, Bunny, a TikTok-famous Sheepadoodle, stared at herself in a mirror and asked “who is this?” by tapping her paws on her augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) devices buttons. The much-viewed video of her pondering herself in a mirror prompted jokes that she was having an existential crisis. Although it is unclear if Bunny was actually aware of her own identity in the mirror, the incident raises questions about animals self-awareness — and whether dogs can pass the “mirror test,” considered a defining test of animal intelligence that distinguishes some creatures cognitive abilities from others.
“The mirror test is designed to provide information on whether its possible for an animal to recognize itself in the mirror,” Leo Trottier, cognitive scientist and founder of How.TheyCanTalk Research and developer of the FluentPet system Bunny uses, told Salon via email. “Intrinsic to how it works is that the animal needs to be naive (needs to have no preparation that might in appropriately skew the result).”
The test, which was developed by psychologist Gordon Gallup in 1970, involves placing a visual marker on an animals body. Scientists then observe what happens when the animal is placed in front of the mirror, watching the animals reaction both to their reflection with and without the visual marker on its body. If an animal passes the mirror test, they will usually adjust their body position in a way so they can get a better look at the marker on their body and pay more attention to that part of their body.
For the unfamiliar, the mirror test is used to determine whether an animal has the ability of visual self-recognition, which is considered a marker of intelligence in animals. Scientific evidence has previously suggested that dogs do not recognize themselves in the mirror, at least as far as previous mirror test experiments on canines found.
“One big issue that confronts questions like these is that there are different and somewhat competing paradigms in how science is performed,” Trottier said. “In the conventional paradigm, the interest primarily lies in finding averages: people complete crossword puzzles in X seconds when drinking water, and Y seconds when drinking coffee.”
St. Saint Bernard Self Awareness – Dog Recognizes Self In Mirror Using The Blink Test
In a breakthrough study from Eötvös Loránd University, experts have found that dogs show signs of self-awareness by demonstrating the ability to distinguish their body from its surrounding environment.
According to the study authors, dogs have also exhibited other components of self-awareness, including the ability to recognize their own odor and to form personal memories of specific events.
In humans, self-awareness has evolved into an extremely complex form called self-consciousness. Some elements of this mental capacity may have emerged during the evolution of non-human animals, depending on their ecological needs.
“Dogs are perfect subjects for the investigation of the self-representation related abilities as we share our anthropogenic physical and social environment with them,” said study first author Rita Lenkei.
“Thus, it is reasonable to assume that at least some of its forms might appeared in them, too. From these, body-awareness might be one of the most basic ones.”
In a problem-solving task, the dogs showed that they could recognize their body as an obstacle, indicating that they understand the relationship between their body and the environment.
Body awareness is one of the most basic illustrations of self-awareness. The researchers used a model that has previously been used to test for body awareness elephants and humans known as the “body as an obstacle” test.
During the original experiment, toddlers were instructed to hand over a mat they were sitting on. The idea was that they could only complete the task if they understood the connection between their own body and the mat.
Furthermore, to complete the task, the toddlers first had to physically remove themselves from the mat. In other words, their bodies served as an obstacle to completing the task at hand.
For the current study, the experts attached a ball to the mat so that dogs would easily understand the request of their owner to pass the object, which would also involve passing the mat.
“We developed a more complex method than the original one to make sure that dogs only leave the mat when it was truly necessary,” explained study co-author Dr. Péter Pongrácz. “Based on our results even during their first attempt they left the mat significantly sooner and more likely when it was needed to solve the task, compared to when, for instance, the ball was anchored to the ground.”
The results are especially interesting considering that this experiment is linked to the mirror mark test, which was also designed to determine whether an animal possesses the ability of visual self-recognition. While a few animal species consistently pass the mirror test, including elephants and chimpanzees, dogs consistently fail.
“Based on our knowledge the dog is the first species that did not pass the mirror mark test but successfully passed the ‘body as an obstacle’ paradigm,” said Lenkei. “Our results support the theory about self-representation as being an array of more or less connected cognitive skills, where the presence or lack of a particular building block may depend on the ecological needs and cognitive complexity of the given species.”