Cats are intelligent animals, as feline parents can certainly attest to! It’s thought by many experts that a cat’s intelligence is similar to that of a child aged between two and three, and over the years they’ve been living alongside humans they’ve been able to observe our communication styles very closely.
If you’ve ever suspected that your cat might be aware of certain things you mention in conversation (say, the best cat treats), you’ll be interested to know that you might have been on to something.
Indeed, researchers think that our felines have the ability to associate words with specific objects or images faster than human babies.
According to previous research, cats can do things like follow human pointing gestures, recognize their names, and identify people and other cats they’re familiar with. And now, a study led by Saho Takagi, a cognitive scientist at Abazu University in Japan, has found that cats could be “hardwired” to learn aspects of human language.
She said, “I was very surprised, because that meant cats were able to eavesdrop on human conversations and understand words without any special reward-based training.”
Previously, we didn’t know whether cats could learn human words in the same way as dogs, so Takagi and her team carried out an experiment that has been used to study language development in 14-month-old humans.
Research has found that the babies begin to associate words with objects after hearing them repeatedly, and it usually takes around 16 to 20 ‘exposures’ for them to remember the terms. In contrast, it generally took the cats just four.
In another trial, half of the audio clips didn’t match the images, and the cats displayed signs of confusion, spending 33% more time on average looking at the screen when they noticed that they didn’t match up.
31 adult pet cats took part in the study. They were placed in front of a laptop displaying two short cartoon animations while audio tracks played in which their parents said made-up words. Per the findings, it looks as though cats are adept at quickly forming associations between pictures and words.
However, further studies are required to determine whether the cognitive abilities cats display are unique to them or shared among multiple species.
On that note, are cats smarter than dogs? And, is your feline one of the smart cat breeds? Or if you want to improve your cat’s IQ, try one of the best puzzle feeders for cats that are designed to slow them down and keep their brain busy.
