Tanya Broesch and her colleagues began by taking a simplified version of the mirror self-recognition test to Kenya, where they administered it to 82 children aged between 18 to 72 months. This version of the test involved a small, yellow post-it note rather than a red splodge, and children weren’t given the usual verbal prompts such as ‘who’s that in the mirror?’. Amazingly, just two of the children ‘passed’ the test by touching or removing the post-it note. The other eighty children ‘froze’ when they saw their reflection – that is they stared at themselves but didn’t react to the post-it note.
Next, Broesch and her team took their test to Fiji, Saint Lucia, Grenada, Peru, Canada and the USA, where they tested 133 children aged between 36 to 55 months. The performance of the North American children was in line with past research, with 88 per cent of the US kids and 77 per cent of the Canadians ‘passing’ the test. Rates of passing in Saint Lucia (58 per cent), Peru (52 per cent) and Grenada (51 per cent) were significantly lower. In Fiji, none of the children ‘passed’ the test.
So, what’s going on? Are children in these non-Western nations seriously delayed in their mirror self-recognition. The researchers don’t think so. First of all, they deliberately tested a wide age range – in Kenya up to age six – and they think it’s highly unlikely mirror self-recognition could be delayed that far. ‘Our impression,’ the researchers said, ‘was that they [the children] understood that it was themselves in the mirror, that the mark was unexpected, but that they were unsure of an acceptable response and therefore dared not touch or remove it.’
