Admit it, you’ve probably tried showing your pet a mirror, just to see what would happen. And chances are they either completely ignored it, or freaked out thinking it was another dog or cat. There’s no shortage of adorable videos starring puppies versus mirrors, but the antics don’t really explain whether an animal can actually recognise itself in the mirror.
Long before these observations, American psychologist Gordon Gallup Jr. devised a test to answer this very question. In 1970, he published a paper in Science claiming that chimpanzees could learn to recognise themselves. The investigation involved a test: Four chimps were placed in isolated cages for 10 days, and had the companionship of a mirror for eight hours a day.
At first the chimps treated their reflections as they would another chimp. But within a few days, their behaviour changed. “They’d use the mirror to look at the inside of their mouths, to make faces at the mirror, to inspect their genitals,” Gallup told Nautilus. In other words, the chimps appeared to have learnt to recognise their reflections.
To be sure, Gallup tested this notion by going one step further — each animal was gently anesthetised and received markings in the shape of red paint on one of their eyebrow ridges, and a tip of the ear. “It was obvious that if I saw myself in a mirror with marks on my face I’d reach up and inspect them,”he said.
Animals that react to the mark test include great apes as well as Asian elephants, Eurasian magpies, bottlenose dolphins, and even orcas. Researchers have also had mixed results with gorillas. Meanwhile, when it comes to cats and dogs, their mirror-savvy is entirely lacking; but then monkeys don’t fare any better, either — and neither do human babies up to the age of 18 months.
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