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How do different species of animals react to mirrors?
Wednesday, May 13th 2009
I remember that recently, I just asked a question that I think belong to something nonsensical in Yahoo!Answer. The question was asking about whether skin color discrimination would exist in we are pandas. The logic (or absurdity) behind this question is actually the fact that panda are both black and white.
One of the answerer, stated that he ever heard that cows will group together according to their respective colors. As a programmer, I know that grouping require some comparative process to work, and comparative process require information about things we want to compare. Therefore, if an animal is to group by their respective color, then they should know about their own color.
Fortunately, Earth is a water planet and water surface could be reflective enough to act as mirror. But do animals have the cognitive capability to understand that the image on the mirror is of themselves? As could be expected the answer vary between different species of animals and for some animals may also vary between different individuals.
Some great apes such as bonobos, chimps, orangutan and gorrilas are known to pass mirror tests. However, is should also be noted that not every individual from a species pass the mirror test.
Other than primates, some species of mammal from different order do pass the mirror test. An individual Asian Elephant (Elephas maximus) named Happy for example, do pass the mirror test. Other elephants seems to think that the image behind the mirror is other elephants, as they either inspected the back of the mirror or bring food for consumption near the mirror.
Another study also show that there are species outside Mammalian Class capable of passing the mirror test. Magpie and trained pigeon for example are known to react to stickers put on their body, only when they saw the stickers in front of a mirror.
The capability to recognize self via mirror image is widely thought to be a clear sign that the animal possess self-awareness. There are however experts who disagree on the notion that mirror test alone is enough to measure the self awareness of a species, because not every animal rely on their vision as their primary sense.
Outside the biological substrate, it seems that some neural-network based robots are also have the capability to recognize their mirror image as their own. Example of such robots were developed by Meiji University in Japan and Yale University in United States.
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