Cats understand some elements of physics and the cause-and-effect principle, says a new study led by Kyoto University researcher Saho Takagi. Combining these abilities with their sense of hearing, cats can predict where possible prey hides.
Cats’ expectations are based on what they hear, a new study reveals. Image credit: University of Pennsylvania.
In a previous study, Dr. Takagi and her colleagues found that cats predict the presence of invisible objects based on what they hear.
In the present study, the team wanted to find out if cats use a causal rule to infer if a container holds an object, based on whether it is shaken along with a sound or not.
The scientists also wanted to establish if cats expect an object to fall out or not, once the container is turned over.
30 domestic cats (13 males and 17 females) were videotaped while an experimenter shook a container.
“We presented cats with either an object dropping out of an opaque container or no object dropping out (turning-over phase) after producing either a rattling sound by shaking the container with the object inside, or no sound (shaking phase),” Dr. Takagi and co-authors explained.
“The relation between the sound and the object matched with physical laws in half of the trials (congruent condition) and mismatched in the other half (incongruent condition).”
The cats looked longer at the containers which were shaken together with a noise.
This suggests that cats used a physical law to infer the existence (or absence) of objects based on whether they heard a rattle (or not).
This helped them predict whether an object would appear (or not) once the container was overturned.
The cats also stared longer at containers in incongruent conditions, meaning an object dropped despite its having been shaken noiselessly or the other way around.
It is as if the cats realized that such conditions did not fit into their grasp of causal logic.
“Cats use a causal-logical understanding of noise or sounds to predict the appearance of invisible objects,” said Dr. Takagi, who is lead author of a paper published this week in the journal Animal Cognition.
The research team suggests that species’ surroundings influence their ability to find out information based on what they hear.
The ecology of cats’ natural hunting style may therefore also favor the ability for inference on the basis of sounds.
“Hunting cats often need to infer the location or the distance of their prey from sounds alone because they stake out places of poor visibility,” Dr. Takagi said.
“Further research is needed to find out exactly what cats see in their mind’s eye when they pick up noises, and if they can extract information such as quantity and size from what they hear.”
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Saho Takagi et al. There’s no ball without noise: cats’ prediction of an object from noise. Animal Cognition, published online June 14, 2016; doi: 10.1007/s10071-016-1001-6
