Anyone who has met a cat knows that felines are difficult to keep track of. They are difficult to locate even when they are in one place because they always hide while you search for them. After some time, The leaves reappear. The new leaves eventually replace the old ones.
Thanks to a new study published Wednesday, we now know that our pet cats probably don’t worry about us. A study suggests that cats can track their owners’ whereabouts even from different rooms simply by hearing their voices.
Researchers have long known that cats possess object permanence or the ability to recognize the existence of an object even when it is no longer immediately seen; however, researchers in this study surprised everyone by showing how well they can track a cat as it moves through time and space.
We believe that the ability to represent the invisible in our mind is important because it is the foundation of imagination and creativity. Saho Takagi, a doctoral student at Kyoto University and the lead author of the study, wrote in an email to Inside Science.
In a series of three experiments, Takagi’s group observed how cats responded to a sequence of sounds played from speakers located both inside and outside the room. In the first experiment, they used human voices; in the second, they used the sounds of other cats; and in the third, they played sounds from The cats showed no reaction to electronic sounds hopping from one speaker to another outside the room and into the room where the owner’s voice seemed to teleport into the room without the owner present. The cats were noticeably confused by this. If a human’s voice was unexpected, it also created confusion.
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Takagi wrote that she was surprised that her whiskered companions didn’t appear to be tracking the sounds of other cats.
Cats may not have been discriminating between the voices of different species from the beginning. In recent years, various studies have reported differences between cat-cat communication and cat-human communication. Another possibility is that cats require a higher frequency to hear human speech than they do to hear other cats’ voices. The sounds that were played in the experiment were not distinguishable, so it was difficult for the cats to learn which sounds they had heard.
Though it seems relatively straightforward that cats understand where their owners are, the cognitive abilities it suggests are a step forward in a field that has for a long time been more interested in dogs. Studies of cats’ cognitive abilities and of their communication with humans have been used to make progress toward understanding the communication between humans and other animals. The relationship between dogs and their owners has renewed in the last decade.
It is generally believed that cats are not as interested in their owners as dogs are. Takagi wrote that they were mentally representing the invisible presence of their owners.
You can totally play hide-and-seek with your pet.
This story was published on Inside Science. Read the original here.