No evidence for self-recognition in a small passerine, the great tit (Parus major) judged from the mark/mirror test

Abstract

Self-recognition is a trait presumed to be associated with high levels of cognition and something previously considered to be exclusive to humans and possibly apes. The most common test of self-recognition is the mark/mirror test of whether an animal can understand that it sees its own reflection in a mirror. The usual design is that an animal is marked with a colour spot somewhere on the body where the spot can only be seen by the animal by using a mirror. Very few species have passed this test, and among birds, only magpies have been affirmatively demonstrated to pass it. In this study, we tested great tits (Parus major), small passerines, that are known for their innovative foraging skills and good problem-solving abilities, in the mirror self-recognition test. We found no indication that they have any ability of this kind and believe that they are unlikely to be capable of this type of self-recognition.

Investigating Behavioral Responses to Mirrors and the Mark Test in Adult Male Zebra Finches and House Crows

“…A variety of avian species, namely New Caledonian crows (Medina et al, 2011), Eurasian Magpies (Prior et al, 2008), zebra finches (Ryan, 1978;Iyengar et al, 2017), jungle crows (Kusayama et al, 2000), African gray parrots (Pepperberg et al, 1995), pigeons (Uchino and Watanabe, 2014), Java Sparrows (Watanabe, 2002), jackdaws (Soler et al, 2014), Clark's nutcrackers (Clary and Kelly, 2016), great tits (Kraft et al, 2017), keas and Goffin's cockatoos (Buuren et al, 2018), carrion crows (Vanhooland et al, 2019;, and Indian house crows (Iyengar et al, 2017;Buniyaadi et al, 2019) have been tested for their responses to mirrors. The general principle underlying these studies is that mirror self-recognition is an example of a higher cognitive function which has emerged across different species through convergent evolution (Reiss and Marino, 2001;Prior et al, 2008).…”

“…Amongst small passerines, the only species of birds to be tested on MSR with both paint marks and stickers are great tits (Kraft et al, 2017), which are known to produce other cognitively advanced behaviors such as a string-pulling task (Cauchard et al, 2013) and learning by observation (Brodin and Urhan, 2014). Although these birds spent more time observing their reflections, none of them passed the mark test.…”

“…Reiss and Marino, 2001) and their responses to a mirror or a non-reflective surface were tested. In most studies on MSR, animals or birds are only tested once or twice (Prior et al, 2008;Kraft et al, 2017;Buniyaadi et al, 2019;Soler et al, 2020). Testing the birds multiple times in the marked and sham-marked conditions enabled us to test whether markdirected behavior was spontaneous or could be learnt over the trials.…”

Song sparrows do not discriminate between their own song and stranger song

“…Among non-corvid songbirds, we are aware of only one study that tested self-recognition in the visual modality. In this study great tits, Parus major , failed to pass the mirror-test (Kraft, Forštová, Utku Urhan, Exnerová, & Brodin, 2017). Given that many songbirds habitually attack their mirror images (e.g., on the side-view mirrors of cars), as if to confront an intruder (Branch, Kozlovsky, & Pravosudov, 2015; Censky & Ficken, 1982), this result suggests that non-corvid songbirds are unlikely to possess self-recognition.…”

Investigating self-recognition in bonobos: mirror exposure reduces looking time to self but not unfamiliar conspecifics

“…Mirror experiments have also been conducted with non-primate species, with positive evidence in bottlenose dolphins (Marten & Psarakos, 1994;Reiss & Marino, 2001), Asian elephants (Plotnik, De Waal Frans & Reiss, 2006) and even manta rays, the biggest brained of all fish (Ari & D'Agostino, 2016). At the same time, small-brained species, such as great tits (Kraft et al, 2017) or cichlid fish (Hotta, Komiyama & Kohda, 2018), typically fail mirror self-recognition tasks, suggesting that mirror self-recognition may be a property of large brains, regardless of phylogeny (but see Gallup & Anderson, 2018). At the same time, there are a number of (disputed) claims of mirror-self recognition in Clark's nutcrackers (Clary & Kelly, 2016), Eurasian magpies (Prior, Schwarz & Güntürkün, 2008; but see Anderson & Gallup, 2015) and cleaner wrasse (Kohda et al, 2019; but see Vonk, 2020;De Waal, 2019) but not in giant pandas (Ma et al, 2015), suggesting that the complexity of a species' social life may also play a role (Gallup, 1998;Prior, Schwarz & Güntürkün, 2008).…”