The #1 source for news about monkeys and apes

[Josh Greenman <joshg1973 AT yahoo.com>]

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