Have you ever wondered if a cat can actually hear you if you yell at her? Do you care where you are at all? And who is he most closely related to? The owner, or another cat living with him?
Japanese researchers conducted a systematic study They mapped the cat’s reactions to the owner’s voice, foreign sounds, and the cat’s meow.
Mapping the things they don’t see
The study shows that the cat is more aware of the owner’s movements than you think.
It is said that cats are not as interested in their owners as dogs are, but we doubt this is true, says Dr. Saho Takiji of Kyoto University, who is behind the study. Watchman.
Researchers believe that cats create a mental image of the owner’s movement pattern, and are only surprised if the owner suddenly finds himself in a place he was not expecting.
The experiment was conducted on 50 domestic cats and cafe cats (which are popular in Japan), which were placed individually in a room somewhere the cat was known before.
The owner then shouted the cat’s name and played it through loudspeakers in various places in the room. Then, a strange voice, of the same gender as the owner, shouted the name of the cat, and at last the cats heard a cat’s meow from a cat they knew.
The cat’s reflexes were evaluated by eight independent subjects who recorded ear and head movements.
element of surprise
One thing that stood out, was that the cats did not show real surprise until the owner’s voice suddenly appeared in the same room, without the cat noticing the owner’s entry into the room. They didn’t get the same sudden reaction to the alien sound or the other cats.
This shows, according to the researchers, that cats have a mental representation of an owner that they can’t see, mapping where they are based on sound. This is called sociospatial cognition in technical parlance, and the cat shares this ability with animals such as orangutans, chimpanzees, gorillas, and dogs.
Biologist and feline expert Roger Tabor was not surprised by the BBC documentary ‘Cats’. He says it’s a cat’s vital instinct to be able to map what they can’t see.
Some of the cats you should follow are other cats in their territory. It is also an important trait when hunting. Tabor tells the Guardian that a cat owner is very important to a cat’s access to food and water, so it is important to know where they are.
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