Your Cat Is Listening to You

T hirty-one Japanese house cats recently participated in an experiment. Animal behavior researcher Saho Takagi recruited 23 of them from cat cafés near Tokyo, and eight friends volunteered their pets: 20 tomcats and 11 queens, most of them roughly around the age of 4.

Takagi traveled from one cat’s home to the next. In a room familiar to each cat, she placed the feline gently onto her lap, then watched where the cats directed their attention as a monitor played back a videoclip Takagi had carefully composed. In the clip, a cartoon of a smiling red sun, complete with eyebrows, shrank and expanded into view, accompanied by the word keraru spoken loud and clear by the cat’s owner. Keraru is meaningless in Japanese, but Tagaki believes the results of her experiment show that cats can understand human speech to a certain extent. When presented with the sun, the cats paid attention to the video for 3 to 5 seconds. The researchers repeated this pairing of the sun and the word keraru several times, to encourage habituation. But when cat owners later spoke the word keraru alongside a drawing of a blue unicorn smashing through a building, Takagi found that cats stared at the screen for longer than usual, as if surprised that “keraru” had so dramatically changed appearance. She believes they had learned to associate the word keraru with the image of the sun.

The study borrows its lively methodology from experiments probing cognition in human babies, who at 14 months appear to be able to make associations between words and objects, and, much like the cats, also pay closer attention to a screen when these associations are challenged during the course of a study. 

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