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The hamadryas baboon is one of many primate species that has been administered the mirror test.. The mirror test—sometimes called the mark test, mirror self-recognition (MSR) test, red spot technique, or rouge test—is a behavioral technique developed in 1970 by American psychologist Gordon Gallup Jr. to determine whether an animal possesses the ability of visual self-recognition. [1]
Only a few animal species have been shown to have the ability to recognize themselves in a mirror, most of them mammals. Experiments have found that the following animals can pass the mirror test: Humans. Humans tend to fail the mirror test until they are about 18 months old, or what psychoanalysts call the "mirror stage". [104] [105] [106]
Although many animals respond to a mirror, very few show any evidence that they recognize it is in fact themselves in the mirror reflection. The Asian elephants in the study also displayed this type of behavior when standing in front of a 2.5-by-2.5-metre (8.2 ft × 8.2 ft) mirror – they inspected the mirror and brought food close to the ...
The best known research technique in this area is the mirror test devised by Gordon G. Gallup, in which an animal's skin is marked in some way while it is asleep or sedated, and it is then allowed to see its reflection in a mirror; if the animal spontaneously directs grooming behavior towards the mark, that is taken as an indication that it is ...
Animal reflectors or animal mirrors are important to the survival of many kinds of animal, and, in some cases, have been mimicked by engineers developing photonic crystals. Examples are the scales of silvery fish, and the tapetum lucidum that causes the eyeshine of dogs and cats. All these reflectors work by interference of light in multilayer ...
Macroscopic examples of chirality are found in the plant kingdom, the animal kingdom and all other groups of organisms. A simple example is the coiling direction of any climber plant, which can grow to form either a left- or right-handed helix. In anatomy, chirality is found in the imperfect mirror image symmetry of many kinds of animal bodies.
Internal features can also show symmetry, for example the tubes in the human body (responsible for transporting gases, nutrients, and waste products) which are cylindrical and have several planes of symmetry. Biological symmetry can be thought of as a balanced distribution of duplicate body parts or shapes within the body of an organism.
Generally mammals, birds and reptiles living in air vary their eyes' optical power by subtly and precisely changing the shape of the elastic lens using the ciliary body. The small difference in refractive index between water and the hydrated cornea means fish and amphibians need to bend the light more using the internal structures of the eye.