Not surprising, cats understand a lot more than they let on
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| Photo by Will Collette |
Along with dogs, cats are one of the most widespread companion animals in the world.
Although
the ancestral Libyan wildcat (Felis lybica) is a solitary
species, many domestic cats live with humans and show evidence of social
cognitive operations concerning humans.
They
can use human pointing cues and gaze cues to find food. They also discriminate
between human facial expressions and attentional states, and identify their
owner’s voice.
Furthermore,
cats match their owner’s voice and face when tested with their owner’s photo
presented on a screen, and human emotional sounds and expressions.
In
two new experiments, Dr. Saho Takagi from Kyoto University, Azabu University
and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and colleagues examined
whether cats matched familiar cats’ names and faces (experiment 1) and human
family members’ names and faces (experiment 2).
“Our hypothesis was that cats learned face-name relationships by observing interactions involving their owner, and that more such observations would lead to stronger learning,” they explained.
“We
tested two groups of cats, differing in the number of other cats they lived
with: cats belonging to cat cafés where many cats live together, and household
cats.”
Cats
were presented with a photo of the familiar cat’s face on a laptop monitor
after hearing the same cat’s name or another cat’s name called by the subject
cat’s owner (experiment 1) or an experimenter (experiment 2).
Half
of the trials were in a condition where the name and face matched, and half
were in an incongruent (mismatch) condition.
The
results of the first experiment showed that household cats paid attention to
the monitor for longer in the incongruent condition, suggesting an expectancy
violation effect; however, café cats did not.
In
the second experiment, cats living in larger human families were found to look
at the monitor for increasingly longer durations in the incongruent condition.
Furthermore,
this tendency was stronger among cats that had lived with their human family
for a longer time, although we could not rule out an effect of age.
“Our
study provides evidence that cats link a companion’s name and corresponding
face without explicit training,” the authors said.
The
team’s paper was published in the journal Scientific Reports.
_____
S. Takagi et al. 2022. Cats learn the names of their
friend cats in their daily lives. Sci Rep 12, 6155; doi:
10.1038/s41598-022-10261-5
