“Even if you can’t see it, you know where it is” revealed the reverse charm of a cat who doesn’t seem interested in ‘the butler’ (Research Results)

Cats always seem to sleep. However, the two ears often move in different directions and hear different sounds. What does a cat think while lying down? Perhaps the owner’s location is drawn like a map on the cat’s head.

Japanese researchers, including Takagi Saho, a doctoral student at Kyoto University in Japan, have shown through experiments that cats can track their invisible owners by hearing sounds. The results of this study support a series of recent studies that show that cats have social cognitive abilities comparable to dogs.

The experiment was conducted individually with cats from 27 cat cafes and 23 households. After leaving the cat in an empty room, two speakers were installed at a distance of more than 4 meters, and the sound of the owner and strangers calling their names was recorded and played several times.

In the second experiment, the sound of another cat familiar to the cat was played, and in the third, an electronic sound was played and the cat’s reaction was observed. Eight judges evaluated the degree to which the cat was surprised by the degree of movement of its ears and head in various situations on five levels.

The key to this experiment was the cat’s reaction when the same sound was heard from two distant speakers in succession. The cat’s biggest surprise was when the owner was calling his name from one speaker and suddenly the same sound came from a distant speaker.

The researchers wrote in the paper, “The owner, who was making the sound from this side, was surprised by the ‘teleportation’ to an unexpected place. He also said, “The cat is invisible, but it can be seen that it has the existence of its owner in its head and then drew the location from its voice,” he said.

The researchers found that the reason the cat was not surprised when a cat she knew had a similar effect on the owner’s ‘teleportation’ was because sound is not the primary communication medium of an adult cat. Cat ‘meow’ sounds are common between mothers and kittens, and between adults and humans, but adult cats do not make such sounds except in fights and mating.

Cats have a very wide audible range (55 Hz to 79 kHz), from low to very high frequencies, and are sensitive to even small sounds. More than 20 muscles in the ear move independently to cover sounds in all directions.

The researchers said, “The ability to know that an opponent exists even if they cannot see it is a necessary skill for animals that live in groups or for predators that hunt in environments with poor visibility. This ability is the basis of more complex thinking.” Animals whose ability has been confirmed to have only disappeared before their eyes are not only children, but also chimpanzees, bonobos, bears, and jays.

Cats are often said to be less interested in their owners than dogs, but this study shows that this is not the case. A series of recent studies have shown that cats can distinguish between the voices of their owners and strangers, detect the emotional state of the person in their voices, and easily distinguish their names from similar sounds. Also, when faced with a difficult problem, they often look at the owner’s face and act to attract attention.

This study was published in the 10th issue of the scientific journal ‘Plos One’.

Cited Paper: Plos One, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0257611

Correspondent Jo Hong-seop of the Hankyoreh ecothink@hani.co.kr