Newsweek: Elephant passes the 'mirror test'

[Guest guest]

Animals: Smarter Than We Think?

Dumbo? An elephant passes the 'mirror test.'

By Jerry Adler

Newsweek

 

Nov. 13, 2006 issue - What does an animal see in a mirror? Until

1970, the accepted answer was " another animal " : a stranger to be

greeted, threatened, courted-or ignored. In that year, psychologist

Gordon Gallup Jr. came up with the idea of giving a chimpanzee a

mirror and painting a mark on his face while he slept. With one small

gesture-reaching to touch the mark on his own face when he awakened-

the chimp touched off a revolution not only in psychology, but

philosophy as well. He saw himself.

 

It was a minor revolution at first, because only chimps and other

closely related primates passed the " mirror test. "

 

Then, in 2001, Diana Reiss of the New York Aquarium showed that

bottlenose dolphins marked with dye recognized their reflections.

Last week, Reiss, Joshua Plotkin and Frans de Waal of Emory

University announced that Happy, a 34-year-old Asian elephant at the

Bronx Zoo, had shown the same ability. (Two other elephants who live

there also took the mirror test; they flunked.) " The mirror test asks

something quite hard, " says Patricia Churchland, a professor of

philosophy at the University of California at San Diego. " The animal

has to say, 'I'm here, that is a perfect replica of me, but it isn't

me'. " The experiment appears to measure something more, or different,

than what we usually mean by " animal intelligence, " which we tend to

define in practical terms. Animals are " smart " if they can

communicate or use tools to get food. But recognizing one's

reflection has no obvious survival value; it's a kind of intellectual

luxury that until recently only human beings were believed to enjoy.

 

In fact, this ability might not even be confined to mammals. Many

researchers think the next breakthrough in animal intelligence will

be among smart, social birds such as crows, ravens and parrots.

African gray parrots may be among the smartest animals on earth.

Irene Pepperberg of Brandeis University has been training one for

nearly three decades and reporting her results in peer-reviewed

journals. According to Pepperberg, Alex has a vocabulary of 50 to 100

words that he combines spontaneously to answer questions or make

requests; he names colors and shapes, counts objects up to at least

five and can do simple addition. Confronted with a tray of scattered

blocks and balls of different colors, he can answer a question like

" How many green blocks? " After that he usually asks for a nut, but

often lets the nut drop; he seems to perform to please his trainers.

Or perhaps to annoy them. When he wants to go back to his cage,

Pepperberg says, he will sometimes give every possible answer to a

question except the right one.

 

Intuitively, Alex seems to possess self-awareness, but he's never had

the mirror test. He can't, because a student once took him with her

to the restroom, and when Alex saw himself in the mirror, he squawked

" What's that? " " It's you, " the student replied, fatally contaminating

any possible future results from the test. Pepperberg did try the

mirror test on another of her parrots, but the results were

" equivocal, " she says; he scratched at a red mark for nine seconds,

couldn't get it to go away, and then ignored it. In the wild, she

notes, parrots are frequently covered with glop from their meals, so

it's possible they're just not programmed to care about a spot on

their faces.

 

That speaks to the practical difficulties in animal research, but

also a conceptual one, says Colin Allen, a professor of philosophy at

Indiana University. He sees a danger that the mirror experiment could

become a kind of pass/fail exam for species. Self-awareness, he says,

" is not a simple trait; animals will have it in various degrees and

different kinds, not all lined up in a single continuum. "

 

So the simple answer is, we don't know what an animal sees in the

mirror. Not even Alex, wonderful as he is, has words for " think " and

" feel. " But dolphins, elephants and human beings all have large

brains, a complex social structure and a capacity for altruism toward

members of the same social group. Is it just a coincidence that they

pass the mirror test? Or does empathy, which implies an awareness of

the state of other individuals, depend on a measure of self-

consciousness? " This research, " says Reiss, " links us to the rest of

the natural world. It shows there are other minds around us. " Think

about that the next time you look in the mirror.

 

--

Kim Bartlett, Publisher of ANIMAL PEOPLE Newspaper

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