Cats have a reputation for being aloof and aloof, but people who share a home with a cat often disagree. But even the most avid cat lover may be surprised by the results of their new cat. study.
Saho Takagi, an animal behavior researcher at Azabu University in Kanagawa Prefecture, and her colleagues applied a method commonly used with human babies to test cats’ ability to learn language. Of those, 31 cats passed the test. In fact, they learned words faster than the average 14-month-old human.
cat language association
Mr. Takagi recruited cats because cat cafe Cats from households near the university, including those living in cafes, were tested individually at home. This was important because cats have a strong fear of new things and unfamiliar people and places, Takagi explained.
“By using Japan’s well-developed cat cafes, we were able to collaborate with cats who are used to strangers, which allowed us to conduct experiments more effectively,” she added.
Takagi and his colleagues showed the cats two different images on a laptop computer screen. One was a cartoon sun and the other was a unicorn. While the sun was on the screen, the cat’s owner’s voice repeated the unintelligible word “parmo.” Along with the image of a unicorn, I heard the owner’s voice repeating the meaningless word “keral.”
The researchers then played the audio and video again, but this time the content was mixed up. When the cats heard the word “Palmo”, half of them saw a visual of a unicorn. And half the time they were shown cartoon images of the sun, they heard the word “keral.”
When this trick is performed on human infants, the babies indicate that they have noticed the switcheroo by staring at the screen for longer when the word does not match the image they associate with it. So were the cats. Cats spent, on average, 33% more time looking at the screen when the picture did not match the word they had learned to expect.
Perhaps the biggest surprise was that the cat learned to associate the word with the image after just two 9-second exposures. When faced with a similar test, a typical 14-month-old human would receive four 15-second exposures to make the association.
read more: 8 do’s and don’ts for communicating with cats
Is this behavior exclusive to cats?
This is not the first study to suggest that cats can understand at least some human language. 2019 study It turns out that cats are more likely to recognize their own names. But if Takagi’s findings hold up to further scrutiny, they could suggest that cats have evolved an innate ability to learn some kind of human language.
If so, that would be interesting, but probably not surprising. “Cats have coexisted with humans for about 10,000 years, and this ability may have developed during that process,” Professor Takagi says, but this study only hints at that possibility. This is carefully pointed out. Comparing closely related species and proving that this ability is unique to domestic cats would strengthen this claim, she says.
Janet Worker I’m a developmental psychologist at the University of British Columbia who studies language acquisition in infants. She is one of the researchers who developed the. test This is a product for babies based on Mr. Takagi’s experiments. Werker said. science Because her experiment and Takagi’s were conducted differently, it’s not clear whether adult cats learn language faster than baby humans, she said.
However, abusing babies is not the purpose of the research. The results suggest that cats can and do form associations between pictures and the words they hear. Takagi says she believes people underestimate cats’ abilities. What message do you have for people who live with cats? “Speak to the cats. They’re listening!”
Takagi is currently researching whether cats can distinguish between foreign languages and languages spoken by humans.
read more: 10 things you always wanted to know about cats
article source of information
our writers are discovermagazine.com We use peer-reviewed research and high-quality sources in our articles, and our editors review them for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Check out the following sources used in this article.
Avery Hart is a freelance science journalist. In addition to contributing to Discover, she is a regular contributor to a variety of outlets, both print and online, including National Geographic, Science News Explores, Medscape, and WebMD. She is the author of Bullet With Your Name on It: What You Will Simply Die From and What You Can Do About It (Clerisy Press 2007), as well as several other books for young readers. Avery entered the world of journalism while in college, writing for the school newspaper and editing the student nonfiction magazine. She writes about all areas of science, but has a particular interest in neuroscience, the science of consciousness, and AI, interests she developed while earning a degree in philosophy.
