Animal Recognition

[William the Bastard]

I have 2 cats. A male and a female. They are both lazy ****s but down to science. I often pick them up and see if they can recognise themselves in a mirror and they appear not to be able to see themselves (I think they see another cat). However when they look at each other they look directly at the face and have recognition of features(same with when they look at me). Television is another good example of whether they recognise themselves. I had a dog that seemed to be watching TV but was he? Was he watching images that made sense or just shapes and colours? If you have links please post them with a few of your own words and as long as it's on topic please feel free to post your own examples of pet recognition behaviour. Thank you for posting.

[Skyler]

Hi Will, Did you know dolphins have pretty much self-awareness as do other animals i.e. primates.

Intellect isn't exclusively for human.

I could give you links but it is easly atanable on the net, it is very interesting to read about animal recognition in general.

[Spart]

I've been wondering about the mirror-thingy too. My dog seems to be well aware of reflections. It doesn't pay any attention to mirror when it sees it's own image, but it certainly can see the image, since it notices other's reflections (like a reflection of someone acting like a moron behind it). Seems like it understands that the reflection is false, since he usually ignores them and then concentrates to the source of reflection.
It can't see TV though, I think it has to do with the screen framerate and such.. He just listens.

Nah, you could find all about this with a brief googling.

[William the Bastard]

Does anyone have animals that specifically look at themselves in the mirror (the way humans do)?

[Simetrical]

One major test of self-recognition in mirrors is that a sufficiently intelligent animal (or human) will often make some adjustment to themselves, like wiping a bit of dirt off their face or something, when shown a mirror. This can be encouraged by putting a bit of dirt on their face yourself. Off the top of my head, I seem to recall that animals that have passed this test include humans (other than very young children), a number of other primates, dolphins, and recently elephants. Some parrots have also been able to demonstrate that they exhibit awareness of the fact that mirrors are reflective, by some clever setup that required them to use that fact to get to a piece of food or something.

Understanding mirrors, I suppose, probably has two facets. First of all, humans are very visual, whereas many other animals aren't. Dogs might (I'm speculating here) be less interested in mirror-animals because they have no scent, make no noise, etc. Second of all, presumably you need a certain amount of intelligence to understand that things in a mirror are reflections of things in real life and not independent objects. Many a budgerigar has been observed by its owner to attack its own reflection, possibly because it believes it's a competing bird.

As for TV, there are some slightly different issues involved there. Unlike mirror-images, TV images have no depth and are much smaller than their real-life equivalents, which may be confusing. Their color is also distorted, and due to differing eyesight, they may appear more distorted to non-humans than to humans. Some animals can see ultraviolet, for instance, which is not represented at all. Also, different animals' eyes may not be able to cope with refresh rates that humans are comfortable with; I recall mention by parrot intelligence researcher Irene Pepperberg that she used LCD screens instead of CRTs because parrots can't make out typical CRT refresh rates. TV probably wouldn't be terribly interesting to a creature with no grasp of language or plot in any case.

Sound is a different matter. Pretty much none of the above applies to sound, and it's possible in my experience to get any animal interested in appropriate sounds. If you have a cat, try playing recorded cat sounds and see how it reacts. Mine got completely confused at the sound of a cat without its smell or sight or presence generally, and ran away.

[Gwendylyn]

Wikipedia has a little to say on the subject, but as always must be taken with a grain of salt. I remembered that elephants could recognize themselves in the mirror, since that is a relatively recent discovery.

[harrymanback]

Just wanted to second the point earlier that the mirror test is a pretty heavily anthropocentric way of measuring intelligence. Given that we live in large groups and rely primarily on our sight for sensory information, its hardly surprising that we pass the mirror test. However, dogs for example rely far more on their noises (and infact see in black and white) so would have little need for a skill like visual self-recognition.
Measuring other animal's intelligence in terms of the mirror test is like an insect measuring human intelligence in terms of a spiderweb test.