I have never seen an octopus "handling" a mirror to be sure about the quality of his own camouflage.
Seriously : I'm looking for an hypothesis (or a notion) about the "comparative" feedback mechanisms that assess if the octopus's skin is in "pendant" with the current background.
My hypothesis is that, as octopuses have a strongly decentralised nervous system, and keen sense of touch, they extrapolate 'colour' from the texture of the surface they are on, and locally adapt to surface, with colour being a byproduct. For feedback, there is the strong negative feedback that only the octopuses with successful matching patterns survive predators.
Dear Jonathan my concern is about the feedback's mechanism, the control "ok you are in pendant with your environment, so you may stop the process".
As I understand the colour change is effected by muscles so possibly there are nerves within the muscle fibre bundles allowing proprioception. I am not an expert on octupus anatomy and physiology though.
Thanks Jonathan, you know, in this period I'm reflecting about the uncertness about feedback maodulatory of a lot of the more evoluted "part" of brain, immune system, and others wide and quite "new entry of evolution"networks system we are studying in biosciences
It is an interesting question certainly, and it prompted me to learn a little more about cephalopods that I didn't know previously.
Http://yadda.icm.edu.pl/yadda/element/bwmeta1.element.elsevier-666da859-3ac9-38a1-8050-8b4b30c3637e/c/main.pdf
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