Awareness of self is a tricky thing

Pretty soon after babbling and single, often-mispronounced utterances become short strings of words, children are quick to let the world know who they are.

“Mine” is one of the first words toddlers use that lets everyone know they have begun to consciously define their place in the world and that they understand they are an individual.

Awareness of self is one of those tricky things that, particularly for humans, spans from the basic truth of “I am” to understanding who one is, and even more complicated, understanding how one’s self interacts with its environment, explaining why self-awareness is considered a precursor to empathy.

Since people are able to verbalize, they understand they are an individual — to explain themselves through concepts that include “me,” “I,” “mine,” and all the subsequent details, motivations and actions that entails — humans are certainly the creatures with the most obvious possession of self-awareness and have been regarded to be among the few.

Other animals have, however, been proven to be self-aware.

Almost exclusively, the threshold for self-awareness is set through use of the mirror self-recognition test, which seeks to determine if a creature can understand that when it looks in a mirror, it is viewing itself.

The mirror test is administered by placing a mark somewhere on the test subject without it realizing it has been marked, then showing it a mirror. Scientists have concluded that those creatures who look in the mirror and respond by touching the mark on their own body are aware that they are looking at their own reflection and therefore are self-aware.

The animals who have passed the mirror test are few — great apes (not counting gorillas), an elephant, dolphins, a Eurasian magpie and some ants, according to Roberto Cazzolla Gatti, a Russian biologist who speculated the mirror test might be overlooking self-awareness in many animals because it relies too greatly on the visual sense, excluding other senses some animals may use more.

Believing dogs, which have previously failed the mirror test, might be self-aware through other senses than sight, Gatti performed an experiment with four stray dogs. At the change of season, he placed the dogs in a yard containing samples of their own urine, the urine of other dogs and a blank sample, and observed their behavior.

Consistently, the dogs focused on the urine samples of the other dogs and spent more time sniffing the other urine samples than they did their own.

Gatti concluded that the dogs quickly recognized their own urine, leading them to spend more time investigating the other samples; a behavior, which he said indicates that dogs do indeed possess self-awareness.

Other animals, too, have likely been overlooked in the search for self-awareness, because testing them by sight disregards their unique ways of interacting with the world around them. Examples Gatti gave are bats or moles, which have poor eyesight and would naturally fail the mirror test as a result. If given a different test based on auditory, or, as in the case of dogs, scent.

It makes sense that science has used the mirror test — which incidentally is also administered to humans — to evaluate animal self-awareness, but Gatti highlights the need to exhaust other approaches before determining we are in the minority when it comes to understanding the concept of “self” and, consequently, being able to form empathy.

Beyond discovering that contrary to prior research, dogs do not lack self-awareness, it is possible that taking a new approach to old questions may also reveal those answers would have come sooner if humans were just a little less self-aware.

Sharna Johnson is a writer who is always searching for ponies. You can reach her at: [email protected]