Review

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.