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  • From: Josh Greenman <joshg1973 AT yahoo.com>
  • To: monkeywire AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [monkeywire] Monkeys Get Intermediate Grade on Mirror Test
  • Date: Wed, 20 Jul 2005 11:51:07 -0700 (PDT)

http://sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa003&articleID=0002A539-0A9E-12DC-8A9E83414B7F0000

July 19, 2005

Monkeys Get Intermediate Grade on Mirror Test

Whether or not an animal can recognize itself in the mirror has long been
used by
scientists as a means of self-awareness. Apes pass the test, but monkeys have
been
thought to perceive a stranger in their reflection. The results of a new
study suggest
that what monkeys see is not so simple: although they don't recognize
themselves, they
also treat their mirror twins differently than they do real animals.

Primatologist Frans B. M. de Waal and his colleagues at Emory University
studied how 14
adult capuchin monkeys responded to their reflections. They exposed the
animals to both
familiar and unfamiliar monkeys of the same sex and to a large mirror. Adult
females
acted friendly toward the mirror and made eye contact more often with their
reflection
than they did with a stranger. Males, on the other hand, had both friendly
and negative
reactions to the mirror monkeys but still treated the reflection differently
than they
did a live animal. The animals' reactions to the three situations were
consistent and
specific enough that human observers unaware of the experimental set-ups
correctly
categorized the testing conditions.

The results indicate that capuchins know almost immediately that a reflection
is not a
regular stranger. It's possible, the authors argue in a report in the
Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences, that the monkeys are in an intermediate stage of
recognizing that the mirror image as themselves and seeing it as another
animal. --Sarah
Graham





  • [monkeywire] Monkeys Get Intermediate Grade on Mirror Test, Josh Greenman, 07/20/2005

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