Chapter
Ten
Evolution and animal minds
mirrors (Bahrick, Moss, and Fadil, 1996).
Children start referring to ‘me’ and then
‘you’ between eighteen months and two
years of age, and around the same age
start to manifest ‘secondary emotions’
like embarrassment and pride, suggest-
ing that at this point they are starting to
evaluate themselves in relation to the
social world (Rochat, 2003).
A series of experiments by biologist
Daniel Povinelli (2001) tested how chil-
dren’s self-recognition varies depending
on whether they are looking at them-
selves in a mirror, a photograph, a video
recording, or a live video. The child plays
an unfamiliar game during which the
experimenter praises the child by pat-
ting him or her on the head, and puts
a big brightly coloured sticker there.
Two- to three-year-olds had no difficulty
recognising themselves (as ‘me’ or by using their name) in a video recorded three
minutes earlier, but only 37% reached up to touch their head and find the sticker.
When watching live video feedback, though, 62% reached up, and with a mirror
85% did, while with a photograph only 13% did. So, maybe recognising a ‘pres-
ent self ’ is easier than recognising a ‘temporally extended self ’. And putting it all
together can be tricky: one 3-year-old said in response to questions, ‘it’s Jennifer’
and ‘it’s a sticker’, but then added, ‘but why is she wearing my shirt?’ (Povinelli,
2001, p. 81). Upbringing seems to make a difference too: 15- to 18-month-old
infants from Scotland, Zambia, and Turkey, who interact with their mothers
with varying amounts of physical or verbal contact, perform differently on tasks
involving more or less autonomy: either recognising themselves in a mirror or
recognising that their body is an obstacle to success in a task (Ross et al., 2017).
And adults remain susceptible to the rubber-hand (Chapter 4) and body-swap
(Chapter 17) illusions, and to alterations of self-recognition in many ‘altered states
of consciousness’ (Chapters 13 and 15). So self-awareness is not all-or-nothing,
even in humans.
But what about other animals? Are cats, dogs, or dolphins aware of themselves?
Do they have a sense of ‘I’ as a conscious being observing the world? Would they
be able to recognise themselves in a mirror?
Dogs and cats obviously cannot. Kittens will rush up to a mirror, look for the other
kitten inside or run round the back to find it, and then quickly get bored. Many
birds continue to treat their own image as a rival indefinitely, as do some fish.
They clearly show no ‘mirror self-recognition’ (MSR). But what about our nearest
relatives, the great apes?
Charles Darwin (1872) was the first to report the experiment. He put a mirror in
front of two young orangutans at the zoo who, as far as he knew, had never seen
a mirror before. He reported that they gazed at their own images in surprise, fre-
quently moving and changing their point of view. They then approached close
FIGURE 10.9 • When we humans look in a
mirror we recognise ourselves
in the reflection, but which
other animals can do this? Cats,
dogs, and many other species
treat their reflections as though
they are another animal. Does
mirror self-recognition imply
self-consciousness?