From: Ed Haynes                                        28 Jun 94  17:51
To  : John Brawley
Subj: Chimps & mirrors

As SUE told JOHN about EVOLUTION MYTHOS on 06-25-94 11:19

JB>    (A chimp, it is said, when a paint mark is
JB> put on its face where the chimp can't see it or feel it and
JB> then the chimp is put in front of a mirror, can apparently
JB> tell that the chimp-in-the-mirror is _itself_: it scratches at
JB> the paint on its own face, not the paint on the face of the
JB> chimp-in-the-mirror.

John, you might be interested in this from Dean Falk's
BRAINDANCE pg.53;

"Chimpanzees are smart. Very smart. For one thing, they have an
acute ability to remember the exact location of hidden objects.
This particular sense may even be better developed in
chimpanzees than in people. And chimpanzees can also solve
fairly complex puzzles, such as ones that involve locks and
keys, or mazes. Moreover, in a series of intriguing experiments
with mirrors, Gordon Gallup, professor of psychology at the
State University of New York in Albany, demonstrated that,
unlike monkeys, chimpanzees have a sense of "me" or self. To
show this, Gallup painted red dye over the eyebrows and on the
ears of a variety of anesthetized animals, who were then placed
near mirrors. Upon waking and looking into the mirror, most of
the animals did not appear to recognize the vandalized
reflections as their own, although some of them did investigate
the red patches on that other animal in the mirror. Not so for
Gallup's chimpanzees. As I like to tell my students: The
chimpanzees woke up, looked in the mirror with horror, touched
their own ears and eyebrows (not their mirror image's), and
then sobbed, "Oh my God, who did this to me?""

Ed

======================================================

Mitchell lists four different "levels" of self-awareness in a 
paper which delves into the issues in mirror tests and self 
consciousness. There are problems with blithe acceptance of the 
mark test as an indicator of self-awareness. If an individual 
passes the mark test, is it because it was able to map the 
visual image in the mirror to a self concept, or is it common 
for individuals of that species to check themselves for 
transient conditions noticed in others? Even if we accept the 
mark test as telling us something about self-awareness, what 
level of self-awareness is indicated?

Wesley R. Elsberry