Department of Psychology, University of Saskatchewan, 9 Campus Drive, Saskatoon, SK, Canada.
Department of Philosophy, Brooklyn College, CUNY, 2900 Bedford Avenue, Brooklyn, NY, USA.
Anim Cogn. 2019 Nov;22(6):1171-1183. doi: 10.1007/s10071-019-01309-7. Epub 2019 Sep 21.
Chimpanzees and humans are capable of recognizing their own reflection in mirrors. Little is understood about the selective pressures that led to this evolved trait and about the mechanisms that underlie it. Here, we investigated the hypothesis that mirror self-recognition in chimpanzees is the byproduct of a developed form of self-awareness that was naturally selected for its adaptive use in social cognitive behaviors. We present here the first direct attempt to assess the social cognition hypothesis by analyzing the association between mirror self-recognition in chimpanzees, as measured by a mirror-mark test, and their performance on a variety of social cognition tests. Consistent with the social cognition hypothesis, chimpanzees who showed evidence of mirror self-recognition in the mark test tended to perform significantly better on the social cognition tasks than those who failed the mark test. Additionally, the data as a whole fit the social cognition hypothesis better than the main competing hypothesis of mirror self-recognition in great apes, the secondary representation hypothesis. Our findings strongly suggest that the evolutionary origins of great apes' and humans' capacity to understand ourselves, as revealed by our capacity to recognize ourselves in mirrors, are intimately linked to our ability to understand others.
黑猩猩和人类能够通过镜子认出自己的倒影。对于导致这一进化特征出现的选择压力，以及支撑这一特征的机制，我们知之甚少。在这里，我们通过分析黑猩猩在镜子标记测试中的自我识别，以及它们在各种社会认知测试中的表现，来检验这一假说。该测试旨在评估自我意识假说。我们的研究结果与社会认知假说一致，即表现出镜子标记测试中自我识别证据的黑猩猩在社会认知任务上的表现明显优于未能通过标记测试的黑猩猩。此外，整体数据比主要的竞争假说（即次要表象假说）更符合社会认知假说。我们的研究结果强烈表明，作为理解自我能力的进化起源，无论是通过镜子识别自我的能力，还是理解他人的能力，在很大程度上都与我们的这种能力紧密相关。
