What Do Animals See in the Mirror? | Hacker News Reader

What Do Animals See in the Mirror?

theatlantic.com

178 pointsnishs83 comments

One of the weirdest cognitive experiences in my life (as a drug non-user) was when I walked through a very crowded, dimly-lit bar and suddenly came face to face with a person who, when I tried to pass him, kept moving to the same side that I tried to pass on. It took me probably 3 seconds to realize it was a mirror and that I was trying to pass myself (meanwhile, one of the employees who was sitting next to the mirror was giggling loudly while profusely apologizing for doing so; not my proudest moment).

The cognitive weirdness was that during those 3-4 seconds, I genuinely did not recognize the person as being myself. It was a kind of out-of-body experience.

Try just staring at yourself in the mirror for 10-20 minutes. It is a very strange, disorienting experience, almost like a dissociative drug.

Oh good, it's not just me :D. I don't think I've done it for 10-20 minutes; it doesn't take that long for me to get the effect if I'm trying (and sometimes it'll happen on its own when I just happen to be looking at myself in the mirror), though maybe there's a higher-level effect I'm missing out on because I'm not doing it that long. Perhaps because of doing that occasionally, I can sort of create a similar kind of mild dissociative effect even without the mirror, just by visualizing myself or looking at my body, that sort of thing. Basically, to generalize it, your trying to see/consider your body as if it wasn't yours, not just at an intellectual level but at a more instinctual level.

The mirror definitely helps though. To anyone who wants to try it: try looking yourself in the eyes and tell yourself (and try to believe) that that isn't you. Don't just stand still the whole time; move around a bit, tilt your head, etc. Try to open your mind to it. It's an interesting feeling. :)

> try looking yourself in the eyes and tell yourself (and try to believe) that that isn't you

I do something similar but the opposite: I keep telling myself that the reflection IS me. After a while I end up in a loop that goes like "I need to snap out of it and get back to reality" -> "I can't because this is reality" -> "no way, this can't be real?" -> repeat. It's both scary and amazing. The only way to get out of the loop is to look away and stop thinking about it, which itself is a dissociative feeling because you feel like you escape the truth.

I'm short-sighted, and I've long noticed this when standing somewhat far away from a mirror. If I'm close enough that I can easily see my reflection, but not so close that I can see that it's definitely me, I get the illusion that I'm looking at somebody else, and then I see myself as the older person that others see rather than the younger man that I'm practised at seeing ;)

Aging doesn't seem to be linear, so I have to say this was more alarming when I was 30 (expecting to see a 24 year old) than it is now I'm 39 (expecting to see a 33 year old).

But ask me again when I'm 50.

Here is a thing which, once I've told you, you'll never stop noticing:

Your reflection is always staring you fixedly in the eye.

I remember realizing, as a kid, that if you could see someone's eyes, then -- like if you're trying to hide -- they could also see yours. Mind blown, at the time.

If the enemy is in firing range, so are you.

Tracer rounds work in both directions.

No, use your peripheral vision.

It's even worse! That bastard is intent on whatever you're paying attention to!

Old LSD prank: hand tripper a mirror ;)

I read about a similar effect in one of Richard Wiseman's books: Look into a big mirror with no light in the room except for a small lamp behind yourself. After one minute, your face should look bizarrely distorted. (I never tried it, BTW).

This is true especially between two people as well.

Right, just being with.

I used to drive to work in a business park full of reflective glass buildings. It was always heartstopping when I would see the reflection of my car coming straight towards me on the wrong side of the road; no matter how often I saw it, I'd always interpret it as a different car, not mine.

In hindsight, failing to self-identify as a car is probably not a bad thing?

I wonder how self-driving cars would do there.

Not related to mirrors, but I sometimes have similar experiences when waking up, except with regards to spatial recognition: I'll lie on my bed with my eyes open for 15-30 seconds and genuinely not be able to recognize where I am or how I got there.

I sometimes cannot spontaneously remember, when waking up, where I am. It is not related to the place (usually happens in my own bed), nor to events the night before (standard evening and night) neither to the sleep phase (I usually wake up on my own).

I then need to think hard about the place, the context, etc. before rationally settling up on the place. I only then open my eyes.

I think that's happened to my a couple of times.

Kurt Vile has a great song about that sensation, "Pretty Pimping".

https://genius.com/Kurt-vile-pretty-pimpin-lyrics

> Didn't recognize myself in the mirror ... I proceeded to brush some stranger's teeth

I always thought that song was about DPD, arguably a more serious syndrome than the parent poster described :).

EDIT: Depersonalisation disorder - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depersonalization_disorder

I think many people can relate to the feeling he's describing. I've on occasion felt like I'm looking at a stranger in the mirror.

I've had the same experience in busy environments where mirrors are placed in unexpected positions where they could be interpreted as another space. Those 3-4 seconds are your brain first assuming that the reflection is another space, then the mirror model kicks in. More likely to happen when one is tired or distracted.

That reminds me about this video: https://youtu.be/TfgDFRyAYVA

Like that, but less vodka.

There was a distinctly unsettling paper[1] a couple of years ago which found evidence that ants could recognize themselves in a mirror, which is really not a result you'd expect from something (ab)used as a "sentience test". I've seen very little followup on this; does anyone know how it's been received?

[1] http://www.journalofscience.net/File_Folder/521-532(jos).pdf

For me, the most unsettling part is that everybody points a lot of good reasons for this test indicating self-awareness, but then as soon as ants pass it, everybody just decides the test wasn't any good to start with.

It's practically a trope in cognitive science and artificial intelligence that there's an implicit assumption we have that it's only intelligence/self-awareness/consciousness if only a human can do it. So we devise these tests, later find out an animal/program can do it, and then decide "oh, that's not really intelligence/self-awareness/consciousness anyway."

It assumes that the notion of self is a complicated thing. My theory has always be the opposite. I think the notion of self is the most simple, most basic thing of all, like the smallest dot possible in a gigantic space. Anything, no matter how primitive, can have it. I don't think it requires thoughts or analysis. "I am" is very simple, it's us that try to make it complicated, wrapping it into more complex concepts like "what", "when", "where", "who", "purpose" or "quality".

In that sense it's not a surprise that even small creatures can realize "this is me". It's a leap from "I am", but not a huge one. And more related to the ability of sense organs than the size of the brain.

I will be surprised if rocks don't have this kind of "smallest dot". They have no self, but the content of their awareness is also empty, so it perfectly matches them.

I think that idea of "self" is meaningless if there's no machinery capable of explicitly representing parts of its own state and operations. There's no single "smallest dot", but sequence of coevolving systems and representations of the system in itself.

You are making it complicated again. The system and representation of the system is a wrapper. It's a construction of a mind wanting to make sense of things, categorize and organize. "I am" is much more basic than that. It's the the concept of being and be aware of it. It does not include description, representation, comparison or context.

There is even the possibility that "I am" can exist without a mind. We can't prove it though, since proving requires a mind.

The article made it seem like the mirror test was controversial as a measure of intelligence or self-awareness from the start. I seem to remember learning that in a psychology class.

Yes. A sufficiently intelligent system will at some point model itself, learning that there are boundaries of cause and effect that are more directly under its control. Only then can there be a distinction between input and output from the intrinsic perspective.

There are mountains of evidence that ants are dumber than, for example, dogs. Occam's razors says that the most likely answer is a flaw in the test rather than ants being some of the smartest animals around.

I think it's a mistake to conflate sentience or self-awareness with intelligence. There is a prank (it might have originated as a real experiment) where someone pretends to be a researcher and gets a victim to put their hand in a box/curtain device that hides the hand. Next to the box is a prosthetic hand. The researcher simultaneously touches both the real and fake hands in the same places while the victim watches. Then the researcher pulls out a knife and stabs the prosthetic hand. The victim panics.

The prank works because the victim began to identify with the fake hand. It might even have the same neural basis as our ability to identify with reflections. But in this scenario, one could argue that someone who doesn't fall for the prank is "smarter" in some sense.

Both humans and ants are very cooperative creatures. And compared to say dogs, we also collaborate on a large scale, possibly including strangers. Perhaps this requires a strong ability to put oneself in another persons shoes (figuratively)? And that self-awareness is more a side-effect of this?

Sure, you can say that not being tricked is smart, but if you're not even aware that the prosthetic represents your hand then you've extra-failed the test.

If the test depended on understanding that it's supposed to represent the real hand, then humans wouldn't fall for it. The brain just sees a hand and starts integrating the visual and tactile sensations despite full knowledge that it's not a real hand. Pretty dumb, eh?

> If the test depended on understanding that it's supposed to represent the real hand, then humans wouldn't fall for it.

I don't know why you would say that. Maybe you're interpreting 'represents' much more narrowly than I intended?

Go ahead and call it dumb all you want, it's much smarter than failing to notice that these two sets of stimuli are perfectly correlated. Misusing information is much closer to properly using it than to being incapable of comprehending it.

If there is mountains of evidence for one side, then by definition Occam's Razor is not applicable.

I doubt we'll have much insight into the nature of it until we can replicate it.

I have no problem with that result as evidence of limited sentience. There are plenty of natural mirrors that an insect might encounter - a drop of water would be the size of a small car to an ant, so being able to recognize reflections as such would be adaptive.

It would be extremely interesting to see if this result obtained for a wide variety of other insects or only for eusocial species. This is a nice paper, thanks for sharing.

given that many surfaces can act as mirrors in nature, it's very likely that evolution has allowed us to recogize our own reflections, especially if there are no other sensations associated, like unfamiliar sounds or scents.

i dont think this ability necessarily translates into some deeper conciousness or self-awareness beyond the outwardly physical.

Yes: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=3388267104904598345

I'd be really skeptical of that, until/unless it's replicated a few times. Dolphins, Whales, Some birds, Apes, and Elephants... that's all I'm aware of at least. To be fair though, it's not the be all end all of tests, and while passing has strong implications, failing shouldn't be taken as proof of a lack of sentience either.

“Recognition of one’s own reflection,” he wrote, “would seem to require a rather advanced form of intellect"

Can someone briefly explain why this is an unctrovercial statement?

Someone apparently did a similar test based on a dog's sense of smell instead of its sight, and it did pass that one:

https://phys.org/news/2015-12-dogs-animals-conscience.html

So perhaps other animal species may pass similar tests modified for senses they use more than sight.

Wiping the mark on its own body may be just a form of empathy. For example, when you see someone's yawning, you yawn yourself. Or when you see someone's hurt, you literally may feel hurt yourself (there were studies showing that same brain areas are activated when you're OR somebody's else are in pain, laugh or else).

Empathy is exactly where my thoughts led when trying to see how robust these tests really are. Watching the embedded video though, I think there's a strong case that elephants are definitively shown to understand that what's in the mirror is really them. Notice how the shot of one elephant shows that it has turned away from the mirror intent on washing away the mark around its own eye. It seems to knock down the empathy argument.

An interesting aspect of the mirror test is what happens with multiple animals. Presumably it's well established that various types of animals recognize each other—that they associate identities with others. So when two bonobos (say) show up in front of a large mirror, surely they will recognize that one of the bonobos they're seeing in the mirror is the same as they one at its side. Bonobos and other apes are convincingly argued to be able to understand what's going on, so not that revealing. But what about dogs, for example, which certainly have some concept of identity in others, but somehow seem to fail the mirror test? And what about cross-species recognition? A dog seeing a familiar cat or human?

A more convincing mirror test, I think, would be if you can silently introduce another animal to appear behind the one being tested. An animal that takes note of a predator or prey in the mirror (or opponent or friend) and then turns around to respond accordingly surely understands the implications of what's going on in the mirror.

This assumes that eye is the only sensory mechanism to measure if an organism is self aware or not. Looking at snimal kingdom we already know different animals rely on other senses more than eyes. So perhaps not the best way to measure self awareness. Besides we know kids upto certain age also fail this test, which means is it possible this is an acquired skill?

One thing the study didn't mention (or that I missed) was the familiarity of those animals with actual mirrors? I know that nearly all the cats and dogs I have known in my life have freaked out majorly when they first see themselves in a mirror, but it doesn't take them very long to figure out that the reflection is OK and become comfortable with it.

Perhaps they 'learn' that (a) it is themselves, rather than another animal, or (b) they just figure because their reflection hasn't attacked them, it is harmless, or (c) The reflection is not responding as another cat/dog would to aggressive and friendly behaviours and should be ignored? Intriguing.

The image also has no smell or sound associated with it. In a human's life, it would be like smelling something familiar, but not seeing or hearing anything. You'd conclude it was just the wind, whatever, and move on. Whatever the mystery might be, you know it's not that familiar thing, because you'd see that.

A dog's sense of smell is like that for them, in the way that sight is for us.

I don't know much about brains so this might be a nonsense question, but how sure are we that dogs experience human emotions and that the behavior we associate with human emotions isn't something dogs evolved to take advantage of us? Or is that the same thing as human emotions?

No one knows what another person, never mind another animal experiences. It's all a matter of inference, and testing which yields consistent results. Dogs certainly appear to be both very aware of the human emotional state, and to have their own emotional landscape. That said, I wouldn't say that they're "human emotions". They're dogs... they're very different, but different and "less" are not the same thing.

As for your last point, if that's the case, would that be "taking advantage"? At some point, if the behavior is mutual and mutually beneficial, and no one can tell the difference between sincere altruism and some fundamentally selfish motive... does it matter?

Ironically I will say that the view you're considering at the end, when applies to humans is called "cynicism" from the ancient Greek "Kynikos" which meant "Dog-like". This is Cynic, in the philosophical sense, not the pejorative by the way... the belief that people act out of their own self-interest; even charity is done because it makes us feel good.

The counter-argument being, "And?"

>No one knows what another person, never mind another animal experiences.

The word "know" has many different meanings, so it depends which one you are using, and for what purpose. For many practical purposes we often can know perfectly well a good deal of what another person is experiencing. So for instance when we see someone walk up to a door and open it, we know that they saw the door, thought it would be desirable to walk through it, and knew how to open it.

His point still stands that inference is what allows you to make a good guess as to what's going on in another being's mind.

Huh. I should read more.

Also, I meant "take advantage" in a strict sense. I love my dog and she can take advantage of me whenever she wants. <3

To be honest, I know what you meant, but I saw an opportunity to pontificate and I leaped on it. Thanks for being a good sport about it, but hey, what else to be expected from someone who loves their pup?

I would say yes. For one thing, they have similar behavior responses to similar sorts of situations, like to danger or having another creature doing something it doesn't like (i.e. poking it with a sharp stick). Also they have some similar brain anatomy that lights up, from what I recall. Also they respond to similar emotions in humans, like anger or grief. So it seems something rather similar to human emotions, at least some of them, is going one.

However, I doubt that dogs have all the human emotions. And that makes me wonder if dogs have one or emotions that humans don't have.

By the way, I want to say this has been a really interesting discussion, lots of relevant points I wouldn't have thought of.

Interesting. In the same vein, I can recognize my own image but I don't think I could recognize my own smell (not as easily anyway).

You actually can, but the smell has to be strong, such as the smell of an armpit after not showing for a few days. (Not that I would know anything about that... sniff sniff)

My dog seems to get sketched out when I make faces at it in the mirror. It seems like he doesn't really know what to make of it, but uses it as predictive power none-the-less (he's seen me reach for a leash in a window reflection and got excited). I think they know the image is on a 2D surface though, because they don't react to dogs on TV either.

Dogs fail this test, but I knew somebody who said that after putting a cone on his dog at the vet, the dog ran up their stairs to the bedroom with the mirror and used it to examine the cone from multiple angles.

I don't know if my cat recognizes herself in the mirror, but she definitely understands how mirrors work, and enjoys using the reflection. For example, even when she can look at me, she sometimes likes looking at my reflection in the mirror with me behind her as I hold a ball. She tracks the ball in the mirror, and when I throw it, she uses the reflection to locate it. She succeeds every time.

See also: The Lacan Mirror Stage, a 20th-century area of post-Freudian philosophical discussion that tangentially led to behavioral studies of humans and animals and their sense of "self", including the kids of studies mentioned in the OP.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_stage

Peacocks will attack their reflections. In the side of your new car, for example :( So they presumably think that they're other peacocks.

There's a video of a large mirror placed in a jungle and the reaction of various animals. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaMylwohL14

Also previously on HN this same topic was discussed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7751593

Or they may disagree with your choice of brand.

Or jealousy with its looks.

Also very interesting, the concept of the antagonistic other. Meaning, almost every animal has some escape reflexes, and interprets certain signals as a foe approaching (fast flickering rippling motions, like cloth). But some can anticipate the foes thoughts and avoid dangerous situations.

This doesn't seem to address lack of caring?

I think I'd just have assumed babies/infants didn't care that their face was dirty or whatever, rather than jumping to 'they don't recognise themselves'. No reason not to extend that to animals?

Isn't there a risk that they feel the paint in their face?

The researchers appear to assume the subject knows what they look like, so a mark should be notable.

Seems a dubious assumption in some cases.

A fun question - why does a mirror swap left and right, but not up and down?

The mirror doesn't do the swapping - you do. If you hold a piece of paper so you can read it, you have to turn it around to show it to a mirror. Did you turn it up/down? The mirror shows it upside down. Did you turn it left/right? The mirror shows it reversed left/right.

When we interact with other people, they are normally rotated horizontally from us, not vertically, so rotating a paper horizontally is appropriate to give them the same view of the object we have. If we typically met face to face with a vertical rotation - one of us standing on his head, but right hands both on the same side, we would think a vertical rotation was the appropriate thing to do to show a paper to someone else, and would wonder why mirrors showed things upside down.

They reverse us front to back. Left and right stay in the same place. But as we are symmetric that way, that is a more "natural" interpretation.

Mirrors don't swap anything. They just reflect light back the way it came. Think about it.

My cat utterly ignores the TV. Until one day it was a show with a lot of barking dogs on it, the cat got very interested in it.

Another animal without accompanying confirmations through other sensory channels, so they are confused and does not act as in the presence of a real animal.

There is no question that they see "themselves". Animals have no such concept since self-awareness (and concepts per se) require abstract reasoning which in turn require a language capacity by corresponding brain machinery, which is not present (not yet evolved).

To be precise, animals do have aggregated representation of a sensory input, which we might call a concept, so they recognize things and other animals, but no abstract concepts detached from perceptions and referentiable by sound-labels or words, which requires specialized brain circuitry.

Nothing to see here.

I can be self-aware without any words in my mind. Self-awareness does not depend on language; if anything it's the other way around.

Edit: I also have a vague memory of knowing of my own existence before having the words to express it.

My guess is that what we call "self-awareness" in humans has several components, and then the question is which of them are or are not found in any other particular species.

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