Scientific American - USA (2020-05)

6 Scientific American, May 2020

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mirror to locate a spot on their body that
they could not see directly. Although this
kind of behavior has traditionally been at-
tributed to a self-concept or other cognitive
process, our experiment suggested an envi-
ronmental component.
Further, it’s clear there are different de-
grees of self-awareness/self-recognition. For
instance, we didn’t report in our paper that
the pigeons attacked their own reflection in
the mirror. Indeed, we humans are often as
oblivious to certain aspects of who we are
as those birds were.
Robert Lanza Wake Forest University

GÜNTÜRKÜN REPLIES: I do not think that
Lanza’s study—or a successful replication
of it published by Japanese researchers in
2014—shows self-recognition in pigeons.
Using operant conditioning, organisms
can be brought to do various behaviors. In
both experiments, pigeons were stepwise
conditioned to peck a dot on their body that
they could see only in a mirror. In Lanza’s
paper, that result was achieved after first
training the birds to peck on visible dots
on their body, then conditioning them to
peck on dots on the wall and then going
through several intermediate steps involv-
ing the mirror.
This process is completely different from
the procedure used in apes, elephants and
magpies. Here the animals are first accus-
tomed to a mirror for some hours. During
this time they are not trained to touch their
body or to attend to the mark. Then the
mark is placed, and the behavior of the an-
imal is observed. In the case of the magpie
study, my colleagues and I used various
control conditions (no mirror and/or a
black mark that wasn’t visible to the birds).
Our magpies were never conditioned to,
for example, scratch the area under their
beak, attend to a mark or look behind the
mirror. They acted spontaneously. This is
the critical difference between our study
and Lanza’s, and these papers therefore re-
quire different interpretations. To give an
extreme example: we could condition mon-
keys to type “to be or not to be,” but we
should not subsequently infer that they
think about classic literature.
I agree with Lanza that there are possi-
bly different degrees of self-awareness/self-
recognition. But I disagree that condition-
ing the animals can solve this point.