It’s well understood that dogs can be trained to understand commands, but what about your cat? The language abilities of our feline friends have been comparatively underestimated in research – although a study recently published in Science Reports could change that.
While owners often wonder about how smart their cat really is, a research team from Kyoto University has put it to the test. Without any prior training, a sample of 31 cats were shown to pick up basic human language skills by listening to human speech – and at a faster rate than babies.
Researcher Saho Takagi and their team carried out ‘the switching task’, which has previously been used to test the language skills of babies. In their study, two word-image pairings were played to the cats who were propped in front of laptops.
These were made up of the meaningless words ‘parumo’ and ‘keraru’, and two images. One image was red, and the other blue – so that the cats, with their dichromatic colour vision, should notice the difference. The pictures also shrank and expanded to further catch the cats’ attention.
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When the cats were thought to be bored (signalled by a drop in eye contact with the screen), the team ran the images again, but switched the word-image pairings around so that that they were ‘wrong’. The clever cats spent an average of 33% more time looking at the screen when hearing the mismatches.
Interestingly, most of the cats had recognised the word-image pairing after only two 9-second lessons – whereas most 14-month-old babies need four 20-second lessons.
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While the researchers can’t currently explain why domestic cats can form these associations so quickly (especially without being rewarded), it's worth noting that your cat might be paying closer attention to you than you think.
Watch the fascinating video where a cat learns to associate spoken words with on-screen images.
