BEIJING : For the first time, scientists have shown that monkeys can be trained to recognise themselves in the mirror.
The findings provide new hope for people who are unable to recognise themselves in the mirror due to brain disorders such as mental retardation, autism, schizophrenia, or Alzheimer’s disease, researchers said.
Unlike humans and great apes, rhesus monkeys don’t realise when they look in a mirror that it is their own face looking back at them.
But, according to the new research that does not mean they can not learn.
Once rhesus monkeys in the study developed mirror self-recognition, they continued to use mirrors spontaneously to explore parts of their bodies they normally don’t see, researchers said.
The discovery in monkeys sheds light on the neural basis of self-awareness in humans and other animals.
“Our findings suggest that the monkey brain has the basic ‘hardware’ (for mirror self-recognition), but they need appropriate training to acquire the ‘software’ to achieve self-recognition,” said Neng Gong of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
In the study, Gong and his colleagues made monkeys to sit in front of a mirror and shined a mildly irritating laser light on the monkeys’ faces.
After 2 to 5 weeks of the training, those monkeys had learned to touch face areas marked by a spot they could not feel in front of a mirror.
They also noticed virtual face marks in mirroring video images on a screen. They had learned to pass the standard mark test for mirror self-recognition.
Most of the trained monkeys – five out of seven – showed typical mirror-induced self-directed behaviours, such as touching the mark on the face or ear and then looking and/or smelling at their fingers.
They also used the mirrors in other ways that were unprompted by the researchers, to inspect other body parts.
“Although the impairment of self-recognition in patients implies the existence of cognitive/neurological deficits in self-processing brain mechanisms, our finding raised the possibility that such deficits might be remedied via training,” they said.
The research was published in the Cell Press journal Current Biology. (AGENCIES)
Follow our WhatsApp channel