How Animals Are Tested For Self-Awareness

Posted by Carrie Michaels on November 13, 2010
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Psychologist Gordon Gallup Jr is known in part for his work measuring self-awareness. In 1970, he developed a mirror test to measure it self-awareness, based on many of Charles Darwin’s observations of animals.

Darwin often visited zoos for his research. During one visit he showed an orangutan a mirror and wrote down its facial expressions. He found that that significance of the expressions was hard to determine. The animal’s reactions could mean it that it could be seeing another animal or that it was just playing with a new toy.

Gallup created a test to assess an animal’s self-awareness. The goal of the test was to determine whether an animal can recognize its reflection in a mirror.

To do this experiment on self-awareness, Gallup painted an orangutan with two odorless dye spots on its body. One of the spots was visible when the animal looked in the mirror. The other spot was in a less visible part of the body.

He found that the animal that showed awareness that the obvious test dye spot was on its own body and ignored the less visible spot. Research found that they didn’t usually touch the spots.

When the animals see themselves in the mirror the first time, they have the same reaction Darwin found in his studies. It’s similar to people who have had their eyesight restored – they react as though they are seeing another person in the mirror and not their own reflection.

Studies showed that orangutans, great apes, chimpanzees, gorillas, bottlenose dolphins, elephants and European Magpies are some of the animals that passed the mirror test. Even the gorillas passed the test, although they were initially thought to have failed.

However, dogs, cats and human babies were less successful. Human infants go through what is called a “mirror stage,” in which they usually fail the test. This lasts until about 18 months old. Pigs were determined to pass a variation of the test. In research, 7 out of 8 pigs were able to find a bowl that had been hidden behind a wall using a mirror.

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