Mirror Test (washingtonpost article)

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Elephants can recognize themselves in a mirror and use their

reflections to explore hidden parts of themselves, a measure of

subjective self-awareness that until now has been shown definitively

only in humans and apes, researchers reported yesterday.

 

The findings confirm a long-standing suspicion among scientists that

elephants, with their big brains, complex societies and reputation

for helping ill herdmates, have a sufficiently developed sense of

identity to pass the challenging " mirror self-recognition test. "

 

The test, which in this case required construction of a

huge, " elephant-proof " mirror at the Bronx Zoo, where the

experiments were conducted, provides an index of an animal's ability

to conceive of itself. It is a quality of self-consciousness that

some scientists believe is a prerequisite for the emergence of

empathy and altruism.

 

Such animals, the thinking goes, are in a position to use what they

know about themselves to make inferences about other beings and

their needs.

 

" It really is a clue about the evolution of intelligence, " said

Diana Reiss of the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York, who

led the new study on the endangered species with Frans de Waal and

Joshua Plotnik of the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in

Atlanta.

 

" It tells us you can come to this same endpoint with very different

creatures and with very different brains, " said Reiss, who has seen

similar but less certain signs of self-recognition among dolphins.

 

Gordon G. Gallup Jr., a psychology professor at the State University

of New York at Albany who developed the mirror test nearly 40 years

ago, praised the elephant study as a " very solid, very impressive

piece of scientific work. "

 

Some scientists took a more skeptical view, reflecting the

controversy that has long engulfed the field of animal intelligence

generally and the meaning of the mirror recognition test in

particular.

 

" Far too much has been made of a very trivial task in all these

mirror experiments, and it has lately reached some dizzyingly

bizarre heights, " said Robin Dunbar of the University of Liverpool

in England. Dunbar criticized the Proceedings of the National

Academy of Sciences, the journal that published the new results in

its early online edition yesterday, for what he called " poor

editorial standards. "

 

Researchers over the years have provided body-size mirrors to

hundreds of animals in zoos and other habitats. Almost always, the

animals act as though the image they see is of another.

 

" Most animals seem incapable of learning that their behavior is the

source of the behavior in the mirror, " Gallup said. " They are

incapable of deciphering that dualism. "

 

By contrast, human babies get it by age 2, as do adult chimpanzees,

bonobos and orangutans. ... for the rest of the article visit:

 

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