Are cats naturally aloof? They actually care about their owners!

Yesterday was International Cat Day (August 8th every year)!

Your cat is sitting next to you, purring soothingly in a deep sleep. You get up and leave the room. So the question is, what does your cat think now?

Even if you feel sleepy, you still need to know where your pet owner has gone. | ​​giphy

Although it looks like it's sleeping, it's likely distracted by where you are and may be upset that you left without saying goodbye.

This isn't just speculation: New research shows that cats estimate your location in the home based on acoustic cues in their environment, as well as your voice.

01

Let me hear where the poop scooper is?

Cats' insight into the movements of others is a form of social spatial cognition . Animals will consciously or unconsciously pay attention to and infer the location of other group members, even if these members are not in their visible place. Cats will have such attention to their owners.

Many cats have flexible ears | giphy

In fact, previous studies have found that cats have the ability to recognize people by their voices . Because cats have excellent hearing ability, they can infer the location of invisible predators in dimly lit environments based on subtle sounds. Cats' sensitive ears have more than 20 muscles , and both ears can move independently in all directions . They can hear sounds between 55 Hz and 79,000 Hz , so recognizing people by their voices is no problem for them. Now the researchers plan to see how much cats care about their owners' whereabouts.

02

Can the master teleport?

Shocking cats for a whole year!

In order to understand cats' psychology towards their owners, scientists have designed a very interesting auditory stimulation experiment. If you are reading this article, you can use a Bluetooth speaker with WeChat voice to do a simple version of this experiment when you get home.

In this experiment, researchers from Kyoto University used dozens of cats at home or in cat cafes. The researchers placed the cats in a room they were familiar with. Inside and outside the room, an identical wireless Bluetooth speaker was placed.

A simplified schematic diagram of the experimental environment.

After the experiment began, they tested the cats' social spatial ability by playing a combination of sounds on speakers inside and outside the house. The sound combination that best illustrates their ability is: one speaker plays the owner's voice first, and a few seconds later, another speaker plays the same sound. When using this sound combination, the cats are quite shocked! Because they feel that the owner is still talking here one moment, and the next moment he is suddenly "teleported" to the other side of a certain distance to talk.

You can actually flash? |tenor

When other sound combinations were used, such as the familiar meows or other electronic sounds, the cats did not have the same reaction. This result shows that the poop scooper has a special meaning in the hearts of cats ! They will infer the specific location of the poop scooper based on the location information of the owner's voice. Now you know that your cat actually has you in his heart! However, we still don't know whether it pays attention to the poop scooper because of love, or because it has the ambition to be the master of humans and rule the world.

03

Don't try to trick cats into thinking they are children.

The only drawback is that this experiment has a small flaw.

The results of this test do not make it clear what caused the cats to be surprised. They may be surprised by the owner's appearance in an unexpected place, or by the owner's absence in a place where the cats expected him to be. New experiments in the future may help clarify this, but there is no doubt that cats pay special attention to their owners.

I know! Once the bubble bursts, it's really gone! |tenor

The auditory stimulation method used in this experiment can be extended to other experiments on the movement of objects outside the field of vision, and in fact, similar studies on other species are also the same. Cats can estimate the spatial position of their owners, which also shows that they have a certain understanding of "object permanence", which means that when an object can no longer be perceived by the cat, it still knows that the object exists.

For example, if a human baby is away from his mother for a short time after birth, he will cry loudly. This is because young babies cannot understand that their mothers still exist even if they are not around, that is, they lack the concept of "object permanence". But if you put cans into the cupboard in front of a cat, it is likely to remember it because it knows that your hidden treasure is there.

Let me see what rare treasures the master has hidden here! |tenor

To sum up, what we know now is that even if the cat appears to be indifferent to you, it is actually paying attention to you secretly.

Author | Jiang Fan

Review | Huang Chengming, Researcher, Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Editor | Ding Zong

References:

1.https://www.sciencealert.com/don-t-freak-out-or-anything-but-your-cat-is-tracking-your-movements

2.https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0257611

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