Author Topic: Monkeys Can Be Taught To Recognize Themselves In Mirrors  (Read 465 times)

hubag bohol

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Monkeys Can Be Taught To Recognize Themselves In Mirrors
« on: February 22, 2015, 12:46:33 PM »



Humans and the great apes have the innate ability to recognize themselves in mirrors—a trait that only a few other animals share. Monkeys are supposed to be incapable of this form of self-recognition.

This began to change in 2015, when researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences realized that, while rhesus monkeys might not be seeing themselves at first, they could be taught to recognize themselves. They developed training techniques that included a variation on the standard test for mirror self-recognition (which involves marking a monkey’s face and seeing if they can find it in the mirror).

Holding the monkeys in front of a mirror, the researchers shone a laser light on them. A food reward was given if the monkeys touched the laser points on their own faces by seeing them in the mirror. After two to five weeks, they began to do so regularly.Their results were published in the journal Cell Biology. The study notes that, even after the experiments were over, most of the monkeys continued to exhibit mirror-induced behavior on their own. The authors believe that the study shows that while monkeys may lack the neurological “software” for self-recognition, they do have the capacity, or “hardware,” to do so inside them.

This “gap” between innate self-recognition and an undeveloped but present capacity for it can teach us a lot about how the neural mechanisms for mirror self-awareness (and consciousness in general) evolved in primates originally, including ourselves. -- http://listverse.com/

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