Only great apes (including humans), a single Asiatic elephant, bottlenose dolphins, orca whales, the Eurasian magpie and the cleaner wrasse fish have been found to recognize themselves in the mirror. This test is known as the Mirror Test, a behavioural technique developed in 1970 by American psychologist Gordon Gallup Jr. as an attempt to determine whether an animal possesses the ability of visual self-recognition.
Findings in MSR studies are not always conclusive. Even in chimpanzees, the species most studied and with the most convincing findings, clear-cut evidence of self-recognition is not obtained in all individuals tested. Prevalence is about 75% in young adults and considerably less in young and aging individuals.
Until the 2008 study on magpies, self-recognition was thought to reside in the neocortex area of the brain. However, this brain region is absent in non-mammals. Self-recognition may be a case of convergent evolution, where similar evolutionary pressures result in similar behaviors or traits, although species arrive at them by different routes, and the underlying mechanism may be different.
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