Your cat may not come when you call, but that doesn't mean she isn't listening. She is just ignoring you.
Recent studies show that domestic cats and dogs have the same language recognition skills. A team of Japanese researchers reported in the journal Scientific Reports that they had demonstrated that cats could recognize their own names in a series of spoken words. A new research suggests that this familiarity may also extend to a house cat's feline friends.
In a paper published in Scientific Reports, researchers asked 48 domestic cats about their feline friends. Twenty-nine of the cats were residents of Japanese cat cafes, where customers can freely interact with the cats while fishing hairballs out of their lattes, while the other 19 were from private residences.
The researchers played an audio recording of the cat's owner calling another cat's name several times. After the fourth call, the researchers showed the participant cat a picture on a laptop monitor; in two of the four trials that followed, the picture showed the face of the cat that the owner had called.
The researchers found that the house cats, but not the caf, looked at the monitor longer when the incongruous picture was on the screen, suggesting that the cats had their expectations violated.
The researchers wrote in their paper that cats link a companion's name and face without explicit training.
The cats didn't pay much attention to the monitor during the incongruous condition, and paid less attention to the trials overall than the house cats did. The authors wrote that this suggests that cats are less familiar with each of their feline friends than the house cats are.
The researchers said that house cats are more likely to hear their companions' names when they are hungry. This could give house cats more opportunities to link their names with their faces.
The challenges of holding a cat's focus make it difficult to take a study of house cat behavior with a grain of catnip. The house cats focused on the incongruous image for a longer time, on average, compared with the congruous one, and the time difference amounted to just a few dozen frames of footage.
The cats decided not to pay attention. The team admitted that several trials had to be excluded because the cat refused to look at the monitor. One cat had to be removed from the study after she decided that the whole science thing was not for her.
The team wrote that the cat completed only the first trial before escaping from the room and climbing out of reach.
It was originally published on Live Science.
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