When it comes to pets, they are not always recognized as the friendliest or even the most sociable. But it seems that cats are less selfish than they seem, since they know not only the names of their owners, but also those of their feline friends.
Recently, a team of researchers from Kyoto University in Japan sought to find out if cats know the names of other cats and also those of their owners. In the first experiment, a total of 48 cats were recruited (29 lived in a café and 19 were domestic pets) and felines were shown a photo of a cat they lived with.
At the same time, a stranger would say the real name of the cat or another name that is completely unrelated. The cat's response was traced to see if he was confused by the wrong name and, if he was, he looked at the picture longer, puzzled by the mismatch. This, scientists say, is a clear sign that the cat knows the real name of the animal photographed.
“Domestic cats paid attention to the monitor longer when they were given the wrong name, indicating an 'expectation violation effect',” the researchers wrote in their study, published in the journal Scientific Reports.
This experiment was then repeated, but with photos of the owners of 26 newly recruited cats who participated in the second stage of the study. “This study provides evidence that cats link a partner's name and the corresponding face without explicit training,” the scientists said.
The strength of the connection was stronger for feline companions than for humans, but researchers are confident that cats have some ability to learn the names of their owners.
Several factors influence the likelihood that a cat will remember the name of its humans, including the size of the family in which they live and how long they have been with the family. The larger the family and the longer they have been with the group, the more likely they are to remember a name.
“Our interpretation is that cats that live with more people have more opportunities to hear names than cats that live with fewer people, and that living with a family longer increases this experience,” they added.
“In short, domestic cats matched at least the names and faces of their companion cats, and possibly with the names of members of their human family. This is the first evidence that domestic cats link human expressions and their social references through everyday experiences,” they said.
But although experts are confident that they have shown that cats have a knack for names, they still don't know how they learn them. “These results,” they continued, suggest that cats can understand who is talking to whom in everyday situations. However, it is not yet clear how cats learned the name-face association. More studies should address this point.”
“We found that cats recognize at least the name of a companion cat and possibly the name of a member of the human family. One might wonder what reasons cats have for remembering names. One possible explanation has to do with competition. For example, a cat can receive food when the owner says his name, but not when he says the name of another cat,” they concluded.
For specialists, “the fact that humans probably don't compete with cats could explain the weaker association between human names and faces. In conclusion, domestic cats linked at least two human-given 'names' of conspecific housemates.”
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