Talk:Mirror test

Should lead section include more species having passed MSR?

Currently lead section states - "..only great apes (including humans), a single Asiatic elephant, dolphins, orcas and the Eurasian magpie have passed the MSR test." This sounds as though its an exhaustive list. But clearly, as the rest of the page itself documents, there are at least a few other animals hat passed MSR - like magpies and ants. Should this part be updated or rephrased to indicate that its not a hard list? Chaos1618 (talk) 12:45, 3 April 2019 (UTC)

Theorethically, yes. But it will cause a stir (see above). So for now, we left 2015 results. Smeagol 17 (talk) 22:59, 15 July 2019 (UTC)

Add please

Magpies have also passed the test Myth420 (talk) 12:40, 15 June 2019 (UTC)

and for fish : Manta rays : [1] - Rod57 (talk) 14:19, 26 October 2019 (UTC)

Cats

Surely these videos of cats reacting to their owners when they apply a cat face filter shows that the cat is aware its looking at a reflection rather than just some random video of another cat. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnT9gPsg9qk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okswxxX_6QU Yaguchi2000 (talk) 02:55, 19 December 2019 (UTC)

Interesting point, but this is simply a test, and as such it only gives a tiny, little piece of the information. As a simplified analogy, I can test an electrical circuit for voltage, but that doesn't really tell me much beyond how far to stand back. To know more, I need to test for resistance, then I can calculate things like amperage and wattage, etc... One test only fills in one piece of the puzzle, and a very large puzzle in this case.

I've been studying dog neuropsychology for many years. It's fascinating to see how their brains are so similar to ours in many respects yet in others so drastically different. In many respects all the basic parts and pieces are there, and it's natural to assume that, since we all came from the same evolutionary limb (so to speak) that their senses work in much the same way as our own. But their umwelt (their sensory-perceptual world) is drastically different from ours. They have much the same anatomical features, lacking a prefrontal cortex of any significance, but whereas the human brain is nearly 1/2 devoted to processing visual images, roughly the equivalent is devoted to smell in a dog, with vision being a low priority. This is more so for some dogs like Bloodhounds than for more visual dogs like German Shepherds, but overall the proportions are just about the same. My oldest dog likes to sit and look in the mirror. He looks at me. He looks at himself. He looks around the room. If I sneak up behind him and reach out to pet him on the head, he spreads his ears to make room for my hand. He knows the reflection he's looking at is really him and me. But a spot on the forehead? He could care less. He could have dirt and leaves stuck all over his tongue; as long as it's not biting him he couldn't care less.

Any dog I've ever had, around the age of 9 months, they notice their reflection in a mirror for the first time, and at first try to play with the other dog. When they can't get through, they try to go around, and finding no dog on the other side, lose interest from then on, not necessarily because they don't know but because they don't care. If they can't smell it, then it just doesn't matter to them. On the other hand, a Chinese fighting fish (Betta) will try to fight with its own reflection, and never seem to realize it not another fish. (Don't, because it will quickly injure itself.) The point is, a single test only gives a single bit of data, and then you have to factor that into a much, much larger and more complex equation. Zaereth (talk) 04:18, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

The mirror test is not reliable because of the following:

Any animal recognises itself by comparison with its peers and also by seeing itself reflected in water, basically because it is the medium that best reflects its image. And that happens with all of them, a lion cub "sees its image similar to that of its siblings" and its fathers and mothers with a larger size but with the features that differentiate them from a leopard or a gazelle.

The difference with a mirror is that in this case their image is so perfect that they become confused and think they are another look-alike. And this fact also affects humans who have never seen a mirror.

A tribe that has never seen its image in a mirror, on seeing it for the first time, is very confused, but this does not imply that it is not intelligent, since this invention has nothing to do with human or animal intelligence. It is simply a perfect reflection that they have never seen before. Jcollmart (talk) 11:58, 8 November 2022 (UTC)

The article should be removed because it does not demonstrate the relationship between a mirror image and its "self-recognition" by any person or animal, and whether it is associated with their intelligence is simply one person's opinion with no scientific basis to support it. And this fact should be put at the beginning of the article, at the very least. Jcollmart (talk) 17:22, 8 November 2022 (UTC)

If you have edits to proposed, please start by providing WP:RS. Where is no consensus in the scientific community, Wikipedia cannot take sides for or against the validity of the mirror test. Rolf H Nelson (talk) 02:26, 9 November 2022 (UTC)

Dogs

I recommend the article Do dogs have self awareness, where I found this quote:

"The behavior of the dogs in both experiments supports the idea that dogs can recognize their own odor as being from “themselves.” Dogs may not recognize themselves visually in a mirror, but by changing the self-recognition test to a sense that dogs rely on more strongly, their sense of smell, it looks like they pass the mirror test after all. Whether this means that they truly have self-awareness is still debatable, but by asking the question in a species-appropriate way, scientists can gain greater insight into the minds of our canine companions "

Maybe could be added... Mats33 (talk) 01:19, 12 November 2022 (UTC)

Blink test

Saint Bernard Dog passed blink test, a form of mirror test where it blinks after seeing finger approaching toward his eye from an angle he can see that finger only in the mirror. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwHcyVQsM9Y BiccFloppa (talk) 04:13, 29 November 2022 (UTC)

Any chance you have a more scientific citation for this? I can see a number of problems with this video on its own, and without peer review and more stirctly controlled conditions all sorts of things could be happening. My two cents are that this video too weak evidence to make a claim that dogs pass a vision based version of the mirror test, or even to add it. 2A01:4B00:BE02:3C00:E0A4:5C38:42E2:8A0A (talk) 21:17, 21 April 2024 (UTC)

Any objections: Expanding the mirror test to include odor and chemically based versions.

Currently the article is about the vision based mirror test only, having alternatives like the odor-based version that dogs can pass under the criticism. Any objections to including Odor and chemical based "mirror" tests as a mirror test, remove the odor based mirror from the critisism section, and specify in the passed failed lists which version (odor/vision/chemical) was done? Sklabb (talk) 21:31, 21 April 2024 (UTC)

@Sklabb, I think this is a reasonable idea. I think we should keep the visual test as the "main" one, but it'd be good to have the variants described more fully. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:42, 24 April 2024 (UTC)