It’s a classic experiment to determine when “self-awareness” occurs: a monkey (or child, or other creature) is placed in front of a mirror. A hat, food item, or other object is placed on the subject’s head. If the monkey reaches toward the image in the mirror, it is assumed that the monkey thinks there is someone sitting in front of it. If, however, the monkey looks in the mirror and proceeds to reach on top of its own head to retrieve the object, then the monkey is said to be self-aware–because it knows that the image in the mirror is itself.

Although the experiment itself is interesting, I have always had a problem with the conclusion. Does this really test self-awareness, or is it simply a way of assessing a creature’s learning ability (i.e. when does a creature learn how a mirror works?). Just because a monkey/baby/whatever reaches for the images doesn’t mean they aren’t self aware; it doesn’t even mean they don’t recognize their own image. All it means is that they do not understand the reflective properties of a mirror (after all, why wouldn’t they assume that a duplicate was created in the image of the mirror?). Self-awareness is indeed a difficult thing to assess, but often it seems to me that the methods for quantifying this are vague at best.