A robot developed by Computer Science Ph.D. candidate Justin Hart GRD ’13 at the Social Robotics Lab may pass a landmark test by recognizing itself changing in a mirror.
Self-awareness, the ability to recognize oneself as distinct from one’s surroundings, is a mark of higher-level cognitive skills. This test was first developed to test the presence of self-awareness in animals, and requires the subject to recognize a change in its appearance by looking at its reflection.
In the mirror test, developed by Gordon Gallup in 1970, a mirror is placed in an animal’s enclosure, allowing the animal to acclimatize to it. At first, the animal will behave socially with the mirror, assuming its reflection to be another animal, but eventually most animals recognize the image to be their own reflections. After this, researchers remove the mirror, sedate the animal and place an ink dot on its frontal region, and then replace the mirror. If the animal inspects the ink dot on itself, it is said to have self-awareness, because it recognized the change in its physical appearance.
Only a few species of animals, including chimpanzees, bottlenose dolphins, magpies and elephants, have passed the test.
