In 2021, Bunny, a famous Sheepadoodle on TikTok, looked in a mirror and asked “who is that?” tapping his paws on the buttons on his augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) device. The much-watched video of her reflecting in a mirror sparked jokes that she was having an existential crisis. While it’s unclear whether 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,” believed to be a defining test of animal intelligence that distinguishes certain creatures. ‘ the cognitive abilities of others.
For strangers, the mirror test is used to determine if an animal has the ability for visual self-recognition, which is considered a marker of intelligence in animals. Scientific evidence has already suggested that dogs do not recognize themselves in the mirror, at least when it comes to previous mirror test experiments on dogs.
The test, which was developed by psychologist Gordon Gallup in 1970, involves placing a visual marker on an animal’s body. Scientists then observe what happens when the animal is placed in front of the mirror, observing the animal’s reaction to both its reflection with and without the visual cue on its body. If an animal passes the mirror test, it will usually adjust its body position so that it can better see the marker on its body and pay more attention to that part of its body.
RELATED: Bunny the ‘talking’ dog shares his dreams
“The mirror test is designed to provide information about whether an animal can recognize itself in the mirror,” Leo Trottier, cognitive scientist and founder of How.TheyCanTalk Research and developer of the FluentPet system used by Bunny, told Salon by email. “Intrinsic to how this works is that the animal must be ‘naïve’ (must not have any preparation that could appropriately skew the result).”
Trottier added that for this reason the visual marker is usually added to the animal when it is unconscious.
“When the animal is shown in the mirror again, the animal passes the test if it touches itself where the mark is when it is able to see that it has been marked in the mirror,” explained Trotier.
Currently, there are eight species of non-human animals that can naturally pass the mirror test: chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, orangutans, bottlenose dolphins, Asian elephants, wrasse and magpies. But is it possible that any animal can learn pass the mirror test, as Bunny seems (perhaps) about to do? Answering that requires delving into bigger questions about how these experiments are conducted.
“‘You only need one talking pig,’ as the line goes – but does that also mean you only need one cat that recognizes itself in the mirror? ” said Trotier. “I’m not claiming that’s what’s happening here… but it’s really quite compelling.”
“A big problem facing questions like these is that there are different and somewhat competing paradigms for how science is done,” Trottier said. “In the conventional paradigm, the interest is above all to find averages: people complete a crossword in X seconds when they drink water, and in Y seconds when they drink coffee.”
Want more health and science stories in your inbox? Subscribe to Salon The Vulgar Scientist’s weekly newsletter.
In this paradigm, Trottier said, exceptions are not synonymous with definitive answers. Part of the problem is that it is difficult to use inductive reasoning to characterize the behavior of everything animals of a given species when testing only one sample.
“In the same vein, if we do the mirror test with 10 cats and find that none of them pass it, then we conclude that ‘cats cannot pass the mirror test,'” Trottier continued. . “There is, however, a whole other paradigm that is concerned with exceptions.”
Trottier pointed to a YouTube video of a cat that seemed to recognize itself in the mirror.
“‘You only need one talking pig,’ as the line goes – but does that also mean you only need one cat that recognizes itself in the mirror? ” said Trotier. “I’m not claiming that’s what’s happening here… but it’s really quite compelling.”
“While the mirror test can tell us something about the capacity for self-awareness in animals that pass it, that does not mean that animals that fail the mirror test do not have self-awareness,” said said Plotnik.
In 2018, questions swirled about which animals can pass the mirror test when a study published in PLOS Biology suggested that some fish had the ability to pass the mirror test. While the study was criticized and deemed “controversial” by some, the researchers ultimately concluded that the cleaner wrasse, a 10 centimeter long fish that lives in reefs and lives for up to 4 years, could pass the test. of the mirror.
Joshua Plotnik, an assistant professor of psychology at Hunter College in New York, told Salon via email that when thinking about which animals can pass the mirror test, it’s crucial to consider the context of the animal. evolution.
“The mirror test is an experimental task used to study an animal’s self-recognition ability, and has only been used experimentally to [around] 50 years,” Plotnik said. “Evolution works much slower, so when we study the evolution of cognition, we usually do it by comparing related species that diverged millions of years ago.”
But more importantly, Plotnik questions whether the mirror test is the best indicator of self-recognition and self-awareness.
“While the mirror test can tell us something about the capacity for self-awareness in animals that pass it, that does not mean that animals that fail the mirror test do not have self-awareness,” said said Plotnik. “Because the mirror test requires an animal to pay close attention to the reflection of its own body, it may not be a good test for animals that do not use vision as their primary sensory modality or that are not necessarily concerned with inspecting their body closely.”
Plotnik added that different animals likely possess “different levels of self-awareness due to evolutionary processes.”
“And all of these types of self-awareness are not measurable with a mirror,” Plotnik said. “The mirror test is simply a tool we use to study a type of self-recognition/self-awareness ability.”
So does this mean that more animal species can pass the mirror test than we think?
“I’m not sure there are many more species that will pass the mirror test, but I don’t think that really matters,” Plotnik said. “The mirror test is just one tool we use in animal cognition to understand the animal’s perspective or self-understanding.”
Plotnik stressed that scientists need to develop more tools to study self-awareness in animals.
“Especially those tools that could allow us to better understand this ability in less visual species,” Plotnik said.
Read more stories about animal cognition: