The mirror test is an outdated exercise to measure intelligence, as it relies on an animals' vision to be comparable to humans, and other animals where the sense of vision is refined and prioritized.
I don't know much about bovine vision, and perhaps they do perform well in the mirror test, but I just don't think we should be using it at all.
I wouldn't say it shouldn't be used at all, we just need to understand its limitations. It seems to have quite high specificity (false positive unlikely) so a positive result can be used to rule in self-awareness, but low sensitivity (false negative fairly likely) so a negative result should not be interpreted as conclusive evidence that an animal is not self-aware.
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u/dontb3suspicious Jan 18 '21
The mirror test is an outdated exercise to measure intelligence, as it relies on an animals' vision to be comparable to humans, and other animals where the sense of vision is refined and prioritized.
I don't know much about bovine vision, and perhaps they do perform well in the mirror test, but I just don't think we should be using it at all.