Cetacean Intelligence - Self-awareness

Self-awareness

Self-awareness is seen, by some, to be a sign of highly-developed, abstract thinking. Self-awareness, though not well-defined scientifically, is believed to be the precursor to more advanced processes like meta-cognitive reasoning (thinking about thinking) that are typical of humans. Scientific research in this field has suggested that bottlenose dolphins, alongside elephants and great apes, possess self-awareness.

The most widely used test for self-awareness in animals is the mirror test, developed by Gordon Gallup in the 1970s, in which a temporary dye is placed on an animal's body, and the animal is then presented with a mirror.

Some scientists still disagree with these findings, arguing that the results of these tests are open to human interpretation and susceptible to the Clever Hans effect. This test is much less definitive than when used for primates, because primates can touch the mark or the mirror, while dolphins cannot, making their alleged self-recognition behavior less certain. Critics argue that behaviors that are said to identify self-awareness resemble existing social behaviors, and so researchers could be misinterpreting social responses to another dolphin. The researchers counter-argue that the behaviors shown to evidence self-awareness are very different from normal responses to another dolphin, including paying significantly more attention to another dolphin than towards their mirror image. Dr. Gallup termed the results "the most suggestive evidence to date" of mirror self-recognition in dolphins, but "not definitive" because he was not certain that the dolphins were not interpreting the image in the mirror as another animal. Whereas apes can merely touch the mark on themselves with their fingers, dolphins show less definitive behavior of self-awareness, twisting and turning themselves to observe the mark.

As a further response to these criticisms, in 1995, Marten and Psarakos used television to test dolphin self-awareness. They showed dolphins real-time footage of themselves, recorded footage, and another dolphin. They concluded that their evidence suggested self-awareness rather than social behavior. However, this study has not been repeated since then, the results remain thus uncorroborated. However, dolphins have since passed the mirror test. (Reiss, Marino)