ArticlePloS one2023
Roosters do not warn the bird in the mirror: The cognitive ecology of mirror self-recognition.
Article in PloS one, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed.
- Rapid self-recognition ability in the cleaner fish.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- On the mirror test and the evolutionary origin of self-awareness in vertebrates.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Conscious birds.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Dimensions of corvid consciousness.Animal cognition · 2025Review
- Alleviating isolation stress in chickens: The benefits of home pen playback and mirrors.PloS one · 2025Article
- Feed additives and enrichment materials to reduce chicken stress, maximize productivity, and improve welfare.Veterinary world · 2024Review
- Using Different Cage Enrichments to Improve Rabbits' Performance, Behavior, and Welfare.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2024Article
- Domestic chickens solving mirror-mediated spatial location tasks uncovering their cognitive abilities.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Olfactory self-recognition in two species of snake.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Why birds are smart.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2024Review
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Touching a mark on the own body when seeing this mark in a mirror is regarded as a correlate of self-awareness and seems confined to great apes and a few further species. However, this paradigm often produces false-negative results and possibly dichotomizes a gradual evolutionary transition of self-recognition. We hypothesized that this ability is more widespread if ecologically tested and developed such a procedure for a most unlikely candidate: chickens (Gallus gallus domesticus). Roosters warn conspecifics when seeing an aerial predator, but not when alone. Exploiting this natural behavior, we tested individual roosters alone, with another male, or with a mirror while a hawk's silhouette flew above them. Roosters mainly emitted alarm calls in the presence of another individual but not when alone or seeing themselves in the mirror. In contrast, our birds failed the classic mirror test. Thus, chickens possibly recognize their reflection as their own, strikingly showing how much cognition is ecologically embedded.
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