The ability to recognize oneself in a mirror has been touted as a hallmark of higher cognition — present in humans and only the most intelligent of animals — and the basis for empathy. A study published this week in Current Biology controversially reports that macaques can be trained to pay attention to themselves in a mirror, the first such observation in any monkey species1.
Yet the finding raises as many questions as it answers — not only about the cognitive capacity of monkeys, but also about mirror self-recognition as a measure of animal intelligence. “Simply because you’re acting as if you recognize yourself in a mirror doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve achieved self-recognition,” says Gordon Gallup, an evolutionary psychologist at the State University of New York in Albany, who in 1970 was the first to demonstrate mirror self-recognition in captive chimpanzees2.
With a mirror in their cages, some of these monkeys seemed to use the mirror to explore parts of their bodies they couldn’t otherwise see, the team reports. [Senior study author] Neng Gong says that monkeys possess the neural “hardware” for self-recognition, “but need appropriate training to acquire the ‘software’ to achieve self-recognition”.
But other scientists are sceptical. “I think a far more parsimonious interpretation is that the monkeys are merely doing what they were trained and forced to do over thousands of trials,” says Gallup. “If I were to teach someone the correct answers to an IQ test and their IQ went up as a consequence, would they be more intelligent?”
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