Cats learn the names of their friend cats in their daily lives
Takagi S. Saito A. Arahori M. Chijiiwa H. Koyasu H. Nagasawa M. Kikusui T. Fujita K. Kuroshima H (2022). Cats learn the names of their friend cats in their daily lives. Scientific Reports, 12(1), https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-10261-5
- Overall rating
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(4.0) 1 review
- Authors
- Saho Takagi, Atsuko Saito, Minori Arahori, Hitomi Chijiiwa, Hikari Koyasu, Miho Nagasawa, Takefumi Kikusui, Kazuo Fujita, Hika Kuroshima
- Journal
- Scientific Reports
- First published
- 2022
- Number of citations
- 7
- Type
- Journal Article
- DOI
- 10.1038/s41598-022-10261-5
Abstract
AbstractHumans communicate with each other through language, which enables us talk about things beyond time and space. Do non-human animals learn to associate human speech with specific objects in everyday life? We examined whether cats matched familiar cats’ names and faces (Exp.1) and human family members’ names and faces (Exp.2). 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 (Exp.1) or an experimenter (Exp.2). Half of the trials were in a congruent condition where the name and face matched, and half were in an incongruent (mismatch) condition. Results of Exp.1 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 Exp.2, 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. This study provides evidence that cats link a companion's name and corresponding face without explicit training.
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This paper investigates whether cats learn the names of other cats by playing them audio recordings of a peer cat’s name followed by either a matching or mismatched photo, measuring their attendance to the photo. The results suggest cats form name–face associations, and a second experiment explores whether similar associations occur for human family members. The paper is clearly written, with a strong focus and a logical structure that makes it very easy to follow. Both the motivation and the results are well presented, and the discussion is thorough. The methods and statistical analyses appear solid, and the conclusions seem valid overall. However, we wondered whether the premises are fully justified (the procedure relies on a certain perception of visual and auditory stimuli in cats). The authors refer to previous research to support this, but a more detailed justification within the paper would strengthen the argument. In the second experiment, the sample size for the condition assessing name–face associations with humans in larger households is quite small, as only a few subjects contributed trials to this analysis, which makes me somewhat less confident in the result that the association of human names and faces is stronger in larger households. Finally, there is a mistake in figure 5: while the lines (showing effects of stimulus congruency on screen attending time for short vs. long cohabitation) differ between the split images, the data points themselves are identical to figure 4.