Have you ever heard of the “mirror test”? Certainly! The media loves him. It is regularly noted which animal species has just passed the test or failed. Bonobos, orangutans and gorillas master it, as do magpies, ravens, crows, pigeons and mountain parrots, dolphins and some elephants. Most species fail the test. Opinions differ on others, such as the cleaner wrasse.
Who recognizes themselves in the mirror?
The mirror test is an experimental setup to check whether an individual recognizes themselves in their mirror image, i.e. is at least rudimentarily aware of themselves. The biopsychologist Gordon Gallup came up with this ingeniously simple procedure in 1970.
At the Tulane University In New Orleans he placed a mirror in the enclosure of two female and two male chimpanzees. First, the animals had a few days to familiarize themselves with the foreign object. Then, during anesthesia, everyone had a paint mark unnoticed and painted on their foreheads.
Some time after awakening – the animals behaved inconspicuously – the mirror was put up again. As soon as they spotted their reflection in the mirror, the chimpanzees immediately became curious and extensively felt the unfamiliar spot on their real head, not on the mirror image. However, the marked mirror image left four stubby-tailed macaques and cynomolgus monkeys, which were tested for comparison, unaffected. Gallup concluded that chimpanzees, but not less sophisticated monkeys, have a kind of ego consciousness.
Two years later, psychologist Beulah Amsterdam tested 88 human children between the ages of three and 24 months with a variant of the mirror test (without anesthesia) and found that self-recognition develops over the course of the second year of life.
Even more milestones in psychology:
2001 Julian Keenan locates ego recognition in the right hemisphere of the brain
1972 Beulah Amsterdam shows that children recognize themselves in the mirror in their second year of life
1925 Werner Wolff registers strong emotions when looking at his own face
1882 Wilhelm Preyer observes how children react to their reflection in the mirror
1735 Linnaeus declaims that self-knowledge distinguishes humans from other primates
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