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Powerful though our subjective experience of consciousness is, paradoxically it is extremely difficult to prove that it exists at all. As individuals, how can we know others feel as we do? How do I know for sure that my neighbor is conscious in the way I am? For philosophers and psychologists, it is a tough challenge, although conversation and a resulting empathy may move some distance toward resolving it. But what of nonhuman primates? How can we test whether they too experience a degree of consciousness?Two decades ago the psychologist Gordon Gallup, now at the State University of New York at Albany, devised a simple, if controversial, test of the sense of self the mirror test. As many pet owners know, a mirror may be a novelty to a cat or a dog fora while, but once the animal comes to realize that the reflection is at best a boring playmate, it gives up mirror watching pretty quickly. The goal of Gallup's mirror test is to determine whether an animal is able to recognize the reflection as "self" instead of just another individual.
The test is simplicity itself. It involves first familiarizing the animal with the mirror, then marking the animal's head with a red spot. If the animal touches the spot after looking at its reflection anew, then, argues Gallup, the animal does indeed recognize the image as its own. "The first time we tried it with chimps, it worked," recalls Gallup. "These data would seem to qualify as the first experimental demonstration of self-concept in a subhuman form," he wrote in Science in January 1970. In the same paper he reported that neither the stump-tailed macaque nor the rhesus monkey "passed" the mirror test.
Since that time many higher primates have been given the test, and so far only two have shown positive results the chimpanzee, as in the original study, and the orangutan. The gorilla, the third of the great apes, apparently fails, a result that many observers find puzzling. Moreover, some observers claim to have seen self directed behavior by gorillas in front of mirrors, which they take to indicate the presence of a sense of self in these animals.
http://www.mc.maricopa.edu/anthro/origins/Reflection23b.html
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