Cats Form a Mental Map to Keep Up with Their Humans

You might not know where your cat is, but the odds are that the cat knows where you are. New research indicates that house cats use their ears to keep track of directional information and therefore know where their owner is, even when they can't see them. I could have told them that. My cats know by floor vibrations when I am approaching the back door, even if they are across the back yard. One cat scratches on my office window screen to be let in, because he knows the odds that I am at the computer. And believe me, all four cats keep up with each other's exact location, even in the dark.

Study author Saho Takagi of Kyoto University has long been interested in the abilities of a cat's ears, which have a large sound shell and can move independently of each other. She designed an experiment to explore whether a cat uses sound to form a mental map of its owner's location. Her team played recordings of a cat's owner calling the cat's name from various locations, while the actual person was elsewhere. The cats reacted with surprise to hear their person in a place they didn't expect. Read more about the research at Smithsonian. ā€‹

#cat #catcognition

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