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A new study carried out by the Department of Psychology at Barnard College in the U.S. used a sniff test to evaluate the ability of dogs to recognize themselves. The results have been published in the journal Behavioural Processes.
The experiment confirms the hypothesis of dog self-cognition proposed last year by Prof. Roberto Cazzolla Gatti of the Biological Institute of the Tomsk State University, Russia. Dr. Alexandra Horowitz, the lead researcher, wrote, "While domestic dogs, Canis familiaris, have been found to be skillful at social cognitive tasks and even some meta-cognitive tasks, they have not passed the test of mirror self-recognition (MSR)."
Prof. Horowitz borrowed the "Sniff test of self-recognition (STSR)" proposed by Prof. Cazzolla Gatti in 2016 to shed light on methods of testing for self-recognition, and applied it to 36 domestic dogs accompanied by their owners.
This study confirmed the previous evidence proposed with the STSR by Dr. Cazzolla Gatti showing that "dogs distinguish between the olfactory 'image' of themselves when modified: Investigating their own odour for longer when it had an additional odour accompanying it than when it did not. Such behaviour implies a recognition of the odour as being of or from 'themselves.'"
Prof. Cazzolla Gatti firstly suggested the hypothesis of self-cognition in dogs in a 2016 pioneering paper entitled after the novel by Lewis Carroll "Self-consciousness: beyond the looking-glass and what dogs found there."
As the Associate Professor of the Tomsk State University anticipated: "this sniff-test could change the way some experiments on animal behaviour are validated." Soon, the study of Dr. Horowitz followed.
"I believe that dogs and other animals, being much less sensitive to visual stimuli than humans and many apes, cannot pass the mirror test because of the sensory modality chosen by the investigator to test self-awareness. This in[sic] not necessarily due to the absence of this cognitive ability in some animal species," says Cazzolla Gatti.
Source: https://phys.org/news/2017-09-stsr-dogs-self-awareness.html
More information: Alexandra Horowitz, Smelling themselves: Dogs investigate their own odours longer when modified in an "olfactory mirror" test, Behavioural Processes (2017). DOI: 10.1016/j.beproc.2017.08.001
(Score: 5, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Thursday September 07 2017, @08:19PM (12 children)
Alternative interpretation:
Any smell that's around all the time, you won't notice; this is especially true of your own smell. I don't see why this should be different for dogs. Now if the smell is modified, it is new, and therefore the dogs notice it.
The very point of the mirror test is to react on the changes of your mirror image that follow your own movements. That's why you use a mirror, not a photo.
Verdict: I don't think this interpretation passes the sniff test.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Funny) by marcello_dl on Thursday September 07 2017, @08:38PM (3 children)
Well, if they react to a newly introduced smell differently than they do to the change in their own smell...
BTW I guess the researcher is biased towards objectifying dogs.His surname in Italian means cats.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 07 2017, @09:12PM (1 child)
Could have been womanizers or yellow bellies back in the day.
Maybe the name refers to that, rather than felines? :P
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 08 2017, @06:02AM
nope, BTW the animal associated to the pussy in italy is "topa", which is female mouse, or the "passera", female bird.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Friday September 08 2017, @04:13AM
Their own smell still is predominantly their own smell. Anything added merely takes longer to separate.
With enough intent, you can set up a test that will suggest dogs have any trait you want. They set out to find something and by golly they did.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 08 2017, @02:27AM (1 child)
I agree.
It feels that this test was invented to allow the dogs to pass.
Perhaps a different approach would be to raise dogs with inhibited sense of smell from birth (expensive way: genetic engineering, cheap way: surgery) and then retest those dogs with a mirror.
Unfortunately, the mirror test has its own problems. The animals that pass are animals that obsessively self-clean; birds, monkeys, etc. but dogs often times could care less. Perhaps many dogs do indeed recognize themselves in the mirror, they just don't care if the scientist put a dot on their forehead. I assume cats, which very much self-clean, both don't care and are too stupid (source: own a cat).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 08 2017, @06:11AM
Have you seen two male cats during love season? they get at one inch from the other and meow, like the scene in a spaghetti western, it is a battle of egos. I know you can find some alt interpretation for this and it really does not matter to me, but had I to bet, I'd bet they are self aware.
(Score: 2) by theluggage on Friday September 08 2017, @01:30PM (5 children)
Alternative interpretation: Humans 'understand' mirrors because they've been brought up with them around and played with them from an early age. A human who'd never encountered a high-quality mirror might be freaked out by it - but someone would quickly explain it to them. Heck, ask most humans how come a mirror reverses left-to-right and not up-and-down and smoke will start coming out of their ears. Also, dogs don't care whether their bum looks big in this.
Perhaps we should also figure out what self-awareness actually is before we start dreaming up high-inference tests for it in other animals. Also, why is the null hypothesis that other animals are not self-aware? Are we absolutely sure that we're not prejudiced by religious notions of "the soul" - or just don't want to believe that any of the animals we exploit as working animals or food might be self aware?
Methinks that if an animal shows the ability to recognise other individuals, forms flexible social structures, shows signs of fear or self-preservation that go beyond a flinch reflex and, moreover, aces the Turing Test by convincing a significant proportion of humans that they mummies 'ikcle furry babykins, then the burden of proof might be to show that they aren't self-aware to some extent. At least we should star from a position of "we don't know". Seems to me that we still want to think that humans have some sort of fundamental, secret sauce difference that makes us more than just animals with particularly highly-developed brains.
Maybe it's simply that we have developed language to the extent that we can tell each other that we're self aware. However, looking at the current state of the world its worth remembering that "I think therefore I am" is only hearsay (woot! new sig!)
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday September 08 2017, @05:10PM (4 children)
I think you've hit on the crucial point. There needs to be an agreed upon definition that is objectively testable, and the test has to be appropriate for the definition.
People always us a lot of "you know what I mean" when the talk about self awareness. With an appropriate definition I could correctly claim that every homeostatic system was self aware. Many of the "approximate definitions" have enough leeway that a thremocouple would fit. But you're supposed to use "common sense" to limit it to the approved groups.
Now if you *define* self-awareness as being able to recognize yourself in a mirror, many people wouldn't pass. After, some people are blind. But that would also render the "sniff test" irrelevant (by definition).
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by theluggage on Friday September 08 2017, @08:57PM (3 children)
And of course, its not you in the mirror - it's an image of you, a pattern of lights. I mean, any fool knows that it can't be you because you're here and it's there! Are we testing for self-awareness or a particular quirk of human perception (maybe tied up with our capacity for abstraction and symbolic representations)? Maybe its something you learned when you were a baby when your parents held you up to a mirror and said "Who's dat den? It's [insert name here]"?
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday September 09 2017, @04:08PM (2 children)
It's not that simple. Consider the myth of Narcissus, and realize that in ancient Greece mirrors were extremely uncommon.
...
Of course, in the myth Narcissus does get confused, and think of his image as another person, but to understand the myth you need to realize how silly that is.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by theluggage on Saturday September 09 2017, @09:50PM (1 child)
Or the Moonrakers [wikipedia.org] or The Wise Men of Gotham etc. where confusing reflections with real objects is associated with (feigned) idiocy.
However - I'm not sure that disproves my point: rather it acknowledges that it takes a modicum of intelligence to correctly interpret a reflection. Just because you're stupid or mad doesn't mean that you're not self-aware. Heck, we use mirrors in interior decorating to fool ourselves that a room is bigger than it is (something that I always find disorientating... oh, my god, maybe I'm not self-aware!!!)
So, the question is, is the mirror test a test of self-awareness, or is it about intelligence, prior experience of reflections or human curiosity (who has't played with a mirror, or stood by a lake throwing pebbles and watching the ripples distorting the reflections - even the ancient Greeks probably did that). As I said, you need to define self-awareness before you start devising tests for it. You need ti be careful about conflating it with other aspects of human intelligence.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday September 09 2017, @11:51PM
The ancient Greeks definitely did that, but not while they were infants. It may require experience with reflections, but it doesn't require it as a toddler. And my dog has seen herself in a mirror several times a day since puppyhood, and still doesn't (appear to) recognize herself. Now of course it's possible that she's just not interested...
So you need both a good (i.e. widely accepted) definition of self-awareness AND an objective test that tests the defined quality. The mirror test doesn't do that unless you define recognizing yourself in a mirror as an essential part of self-awareness.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.