Cats’ Social Intelligence and Rapid Image-Word Learning

A recent study reveals that cats can learn image-word pairs faster than 14-month-old toddlers. However, it was the study’s introduction that caught my eye.

It summarises a number of cat behaviour research findings, showing that cats have a complex social intelligence. For instance, they can differentiate between familiar and unfamiliar human voices, match voices to faces, and even learn the names of their feline ‘friends’:

it has been shown that modern cats read a variety of human’s social cues. […] For example, cats follow human pointing, discriminate human attentional states, refer to a human face when confronted with novelty, and discriminate human emotional expressions.

[Cats] discriminate their owner’s voice from an unfamiliar person’s voice, mentally map the owner’s position from her voice, predict the owner’s face upon hearing her voice, and match emotional expressions and sounds. Furthermore, […] cats differentiate between their own name and similar-sounding nouns. In addition to this sensitivity to their own name, they even represent a familiar cat’s face upon hearing that cat’s name, suggesting formation of a link between the human utterance (the cat’s name) and “the cat”. The study showed that cats learn a familiar conspecific’s name through routine daily experience, not explicit training involving rewards, which is also how human infants learn other people’s names.

This study adds to this, finding that cats can associate human speech with specific visual objects. Learning such image-word pairings is a fundamental ability for word acquisition, and the researchers observed that cats “habituated to the stimulus pairing” after only two 9-second trials, compared to “at least four 20-second trials” required by 14-month-old infants.

I’ve still got Cat Sense and The Trainable Cat on my reading list—both of which I heard about from NPR’s Fresh Air (here and here) and on NPR’s 2013 Book Concierge (earlier). I guess I’ll have to bump them up the list a bit.

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