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Comment by godelski | Hacker News Reader

This is an anecdotal story, but has made me feel weird about this test in general.

I have a cat (who do not pass the mirror test) who loves mirrors. She just likes looking at herself in them. It is weird. She also frequently walks in on me in the bathroom and frequently looks at me through the mirror. And I know she looks at that one because it is the one I look at her with. So it always has made me feel like this test may be doing something else, because she clearly recognizes that I'm not in the mirror, but that she can see me with it. So it seems like she understands what a reflection is, but not her self in the reflection.

So it seems that animals can understand reflections, but does that really mean they recognize a self if they recognize themselves in it? IDK, I'm not a biologist and may be missing a lot from this test.

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The mirror test is very flawed because it assumes other animals think ( or recognize ) like we do. We are mostly visual creatures so we create visual tests. But animals like cats are predominantly olfactory creatures. So if you planted smells of the cat, the cat would immediately recognize the smell as itself.

Imagine if cat psychologists created a test for humans. They would probably put your scent on one shirt and 9 other scents of other people on 9 different shirts and have you "recognize" yourself by picking out the shirt with your scent. Since we are visual creatures, we would fail such a test and the cat psychologists would claim that humans obviously have no self-aware. After all, how could a self-aware creature not recognize it's own scent.

That's how absurd the mirror test is. A mirror test for most animals would be like a smell test for humans. A cat might not recognize it's own reflection, but it will recognize its own scent. A human might not recognize our own scent, but we'll recognize our own reflection.

Interesting point, but not a great analogy. A reflection is a "live" copy, you can move your arm, and see your reflection move its arm. Your scent experiment is more like recognizing from photos.

What difference does it makes whether it is "live" or not? Ultimately, the question is about recognition and self-awareness. Whether you can do that through a reflection or a photo or a video or scent, it doesn't matter.

Also, I think don't you understood my point. My point is that different species recognize themselves differently. Cats recognize themselves and others through smell. So a mirror test is not applicable. It would be like giving a blind man the mirror test and expecting an actionable result.

I have two Siamese cats, one of which does exactly what you describe. So I started testing this a bit and noticed that if she’s facing away from me and looking at me in the mirror and I reach for her from behind like I’m going to scratch her, she will stand up to meet my hand. This seems to mean that she understands that what she’s seeing in the mirror is just a reflection and that when the guy in the mirror is about to scratch the cat in the mirror, it’s actually me that’s about to scratch her.

Yes! She does exactly that too. And I do have to mention that my cat is deathly afraid of anyone that isn't me. So it wound stand to reason that she recognizes that it is the "me" that she knows.

That being said, cats don't have excellent eyesight. But it is hard to do the mirror test with a creature that is so sensitive to feels and smells. I wonder how they test it for cats. Because surely a little dot isn't good enough. Maybe a laser dot?

Cats have been observed passing the mirror test. One popular hypothesis is that they can recognize themselves, they just don't care. That or some cats are capable of recognizing themselves and some aren't.

Wait, really? Is there scientific documentation of this too?

Don't think this is grounded in reality, but if I imagine the perspective of a cat, there are a lot of other concepts that we could be taking for granted. Kind of related to object permanence, we have a strong grasp that what we see a copy of in the mirror is the same object. But for a cat, this probably doesn't hold true. I can imagine a cat modeling a mirror as a window, beyond which for some reason there lives another copy of you, and another cat (her copy) as well. But since she's checked that she can't go over there, it's not important to her, and no glaring contradictions to this view would arise to require adjusting this model. The overarching principle could simply be that a cat doesn't really concern itself with something not immediately actionable.

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