According to University College London, wild baboons failed to recognize themselves in a mirror, thus flunking a test of self-awareness.

Published today in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the study found that while the baboons noticed and responded to a laser mark shone on their arms, legs and hands, they did not react when they saw, via their mirror reflection, the laser on their faces and ears.

It was the first time a controlled laser mark test has been done on these animals in a wild setting and strengthens the evidence from other studies that monkeys don’t recognise their own reflection. “Wild baboons not capable of visual self-awareness when viewing their own reflection,” ScienceDaily, January 21, 2025. The paper is open access.

The study involved 120 Chacma baboons in Tsaobis Nature Park, Namibia:

“The Chacma baboons we observed in Tsaobis Nature Park certainly enjoyed using the mirrors as a new toy, but throughout our study they didn’t quite understand that the mirror’s reflection represented their own bodies and that the laser mark in the mirror image was, indeed, on themselves.” “Viewing their own reflection,”

Underlying this test is an assumption:

Study author Dr Alecia Carter (UCL Anthropology) said: “We define self-awareness as ‘the capacity to become the object of your own attention’ and we test this capacity by assessing an individual’s ability to identify an image of themselves. “Viewing their own reflection,”

But why should we be so certain that visual recognition is the criterion for self-awareness? Some fish, ants, and mice pass the mirror test but dogs frequently do not. Are we to believe that fish or ants are more self-aware than dogs?

Science philosopher Stephen Fleischfresser noted when a fish passed the test that drawing such conclusions becomes “less and less justified the further one moves from apes and humans, with certainty decreasing as ‘taxonomic distance increases between the test species and the primate taxa for which the test was initially designed.’” Right.

Interesting research though.

In this video, it seems clear that not one of the animals recognizes that the figure in the mirror is a reflection of itself: