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Comment by jeffhiggins | Hacker News Reader

Interesting idea, that the mirror test for dogs is unfair because their vision sucks compared to their nose, but this reasoning seems to take quite a leap. From the article:

“This study confirmed the previous evidence proposed with the STSR by Dr. Cazzolla Gatti showing that "dogs distinguish between the olfactory 'image' of themselves when modified: investigating their own odour for longer when it had an additional odour accompanying it than when it did not. Such behaviour implies a recognition of the odour as being of or from 'themselves'."”

Maybe the dogs just recognize their own modified scent as very familliar? Not as a representation of themseles, but just a smelll they smell often. I love dogs, and don’t doubt for a moment they have some level of self-awareness similar to our own, but to me, this test stinks.

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The mirror test works like this: you stealthily put a mark on the face or head of the being and then present the mirror. If the being then tries to reach the mark it is a strong clue of self-recognition.

In the excerpt the exact way of the sniff test is not described. I didn't read the paper, hoping for a summary here on HN. I thought maybey they controlled for confounding effects, for example by presenting other familiar smells, including the smell of self. The modified smell showing a higher level of interest compared to other smells would be a clue of self-recognition.

Anyway the approach shows clearly a bias of the mirror test. You could say the mirror test was discriminating the dogs.

This might be a leap, but I felt reminded of the hearing bias Deaf people experience every day. The majority of people assume that hearing and communicating via the audio channel is the way to go, and so I experience hurdles like needing to phone for identification for services.

I sympathise with the dogs.

Is this like the experiment where they put a dot on a bird and then showed the bird itself in a mirror, and then the bird tried to clean the dot off itself?

It seems that compared to the mirror test, this sniff test lacks an action analogous to the "wiping the mark off the face" action or (from the paper) "use the mirror to direct examination of the mark" that tends to happen in the mirror test, which would allow for differentiation between sniffing out of increased interest/familiarity and self-recognition.

Read at least the real scientific article abstract (or even the whole article if you can):

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S037663571...

E.g. " Finally, in a second experiment, subjects spent longer with the modified stimulus than with the modified odour by itself, indicating that novelty alone does not explain the dogs' behavior."

If you read a news item about the scientific article and it appears lacking, most of the time it's that the journalist (or the editor) simply omitted the details that make the argument consistent. The news can't copy everything word-for-word, and the time that the "reporter" has to write the "news" and the time he spent on learning on the subject are typically many orders of magnitude smaller than the person who did the scientific work.

Which also doesn't mean that all scientific papers can stand the test of the time. But when seeing inconsistencies, it's worth to first look at the real thing.

Low lets do the scent test on humans and see how well they will perform in it.

Point being that perhaps the visual markers we used for dogs were not sufficiently strong.

> Interesting idea, that the mirror test for dogs is unfair because their vision sucks compared to their nose, but this reasoning seems to take quite a leap.

This has been a decades old complaint about the mirror test. It is a human biased test which favors the visual over other senses. Different animals use different senses. It would be like giving the mirror test to a blind person and then claiming the guy wasn't self aware.

Then there is the entire about what "self-aware" means, especially in the current environment where the "self" has taken quite a philosophical and scientific beating where the "self" like the "soul" appears to be a man-made illusion/fantasy.

> I love dogs, and don’t doubt for a moment they have some level of self-awareness similar to our own, but to me, this test stinks.

This is an age old philosophical problem. Should we expect a dog or any animal to have "self-awareness similar to our own"? If so, is it even possible to verify it either way? Considering our brains are different, is it even physically possibly for two species to be "self-aware" in the same sense of the word?

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