A new study has confirmed what most dog owners knew anyway – their canine friends do have self-awareness.
Humans, great apes, an Asian elephant, some dolphins, magpies and some ants have all passed a self-recognition test, and now dogs have been added to the list.
Researchers used urine samples to create a sniff test to show that man’s best friends can decipher between itself and others.
While dogs can’t recognize themselves in a mirror, they can recognize their own smell. A new study found this to be the case after conducting experiments where 36 domestic dogs, accompanied by their owners, were presented with their own urine samples
HOW THEY DID IT
The mirror test is used to assess if an individual is capable of using their own reflection to notice and touch a mark, usually a red dot, during a period of distraction on the face, head or other parts of the body.
This evaluates their ability to understand the concept of ‘self’ and ‘the other’ and ability to distinguish between the two.
While dogs can’t recognize themselves in a mirror, they can recognize their own smell.
A new study, led by Dr Alexandra Horowitz at Barnard College in the US, found this to be the case after conducting a study where 36 domestic dogs, accompanies by their owners, were presented with their own urine samples, those of other dogs, as well as those where their own urine was modified.
The researchers looked at how long each dog investigated each sample-containing canister, finding that dogs can distinguish between their own scent, even when it is modified – they investigated their own urine for longer when it had an additional odor accompanying it than when it didn’t.
According to Dr Horowitz’s study, ‘such behavior implies a recognition of the odor as being of or from ‘themselves.’
The canisters were 3.3-cm wide round tin containers with three air holes in their lids. .
I most tests, the mirror test is used to assess if an individual is capable of using their own reflection to notice and touch a mark, usually a red dot, during a period of distraction on the face, head or other parts of the body.
This evaluates their ability to understand the concept of ‘self’ and ‘the other’ and ability to distinguish between the two.
The ability to differentiate oneself from others is often considered to play a role in understanding that someone else may be happy or sad, even if the viewer is not.
But while dogs can’t recognize themselves in a mirror, they can recognize their own smell.
A new study, led by Dr Alexandra Horowitz at Barnard College in the US, found this to be the case after conducting experiments where 36 domestic dogs, accompanied by their owners, were presented with their own urine samples, those of other dogs, as well as those where their own urine was modified.
The researchers looked at how long each dog investigated each sample-containing canister, finding that dogs can distinguish between their own scent, even when it is modified – they investigated their own urine for longer when it had an additional odor accompanying it than when it didn’t.
According to Dr Horowitz’s study, ‘such behavior implies a recognition of the odor as being of or from ‘themselves.”
The experiment confirms the hypothesis of dogs’ self-cognition proposed last year by Professor Roberto Cazzolla Gatti, a researchers at the Biological Institute of Tomsk State University, Russia.
Dr Horowitz borrowed her approach from Professor Cazzolla Gatti – called the ‘Sniff test of self-recognition (STSR).’
Professor Cazzolla Gatti proposed the test in order to shed light on different ways of checking for self-recognition, in his research paper entitled ‘Self-consciousness: beyond the looking-glass and what dog found there.’
‘When I became interested in this aspect of ethology I went through the scientific literature and I discovered that, however, the ability to recognize their own image in the mirror is a skill extremely rare in the animal kingdom’, said Dr Cazzolla Gatti at the time, and soon after Dr Horowitz’s study followed.
‘A wide range of species have been observed to fail the test, including several species of monkeys, giant pandas, sea lions, birds, and dogs.
‘This sniff-test could change the way some experiments on animal behavior are validated.’
In the past, dogs have had no interest in looking in the mirror, except to sniff or urinate around it.
Dogs and wolves, like dolphins, show a high level of cognitive complexity, but previous attempts to demonstrate the self-recognition of these animals have been inconclusive.
WHAT IS THE MIRROR TEST?
The mirror test is a measure of self-awareness developed by Gordon Gallup Jr in 1970.
The mirror test gauges self-awareness by determining whether an animal can recognize its own reflection in a mirror
The test gauges self-awareness by determining whether an animal can recognize its own reflection in a mirror as an image of itself.
This is accomplished by surreptitiously marking the animal with an odorless dye, and observing whether the animal reacts in a manner consistent with it being aware that the dye is located on its own body.
Such behavior might include turning and adjusting of the body in order to better view the marking in the mirror, or poking at the marking on its own body with a finger while viewing the mirror.
Animals which have passed the mirror test are common chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans, dolphins, elephants, humans and possibly pigeons.
Surprisingly, gorillas have not passed the test, although at least one specific gorilla, Koko, has passed the test; this is probably because gorillas consider eye contact an aggressive gesture and normally try to avoid looking each other in the face.
Human children tend to fail this test until they are at least 1.5 to 2 years old.
‘I believe that dogs and other animals, being much less sensitive to visual stimuli with respect to what, for example, humans and many apes are, cannot pass the mirror test because of the sensory modality chosen by the investigator to test the self-awareness and this in not, necessarily, due to the absence of this cognitive ability in some animal species,’ Professor Cazzolla Gatti told the DailyMail.com last year.
Professor Cazzolla Gatti’s idea and experiment, confirmed by Dr Horowitz on a sample of 36 dogs, shows that ‘the sniff test of self-recognition (STSR) even when applied to multiple individuals living in groups and with different ages and sexes, provides significant evidences of self-awareness in dogs, and can play a crucial role in showing that this capacity is not a specific feature of only great apes, humans and a few other animals, but it depends on the way in which researchers try to verify it.’
This approach to testing self-awareness highlights the need to shift the human-focused idea of consciousness to a species-specific perspective.
The mirror test is used to assess if an individual is capable of using their own reflection to notice and touch a mark, usually a red dot, during a period of distraction on the face, head or other parts of the body. This looks at their ability to understand the concept of ‘self’ and ‘the other’ and able to distinguish between the two
‘We would never expect that a mole or a bat can recognize themselves in a mirror, but now we have strong empirical evidences to suggest that if species other than primates are tested on chemical or auditory perception base, we could get really unexpected results,’ wrote Professor Cazzolla Gatti in his research paper last year.
As such, the STSR can be used to study other animals, such as bats or moles who could never recognize themselves in a mirror.
Professor Cazzolla Gatti’s study last year also showed that the time spent sniffing the samples depending on the age of the dogs, with older dogs spending more time sniffing their urine.
This indicates self-awareness increases with age, which is also demonstrated in other species like chimpanzees and humans.