Cats can recognize their own names if their owners say them regularly. This is the conclusion reached by a team of researchers in Japan. The research was largely conducted in the laboratory of Professor Toshikazu Hasegawa at the University of Tokyo with Atsuko Saito, lead author of the research.
Evolution of cats
This is the first research to study the ability of cats to understand human voices. Other research projects have found that apes, dolphins, parrots or dogs can understand some words that humans say.
Saito considers dolphins and apes to be social animals by nature and therefore more inclined to interact with people and respond to human signals. On the other hand, cats are not so sociable, since they only interact with us when they want to.
Thus, this study could provide clues about how humans became social because, according to the team of researchers, both humans and cats have evolved through the process of self-domestication. In other words, the population rewards certain behaviors that later become more and more common in future generations.
Study development
To test whether cats recognize their own name, the researchers tried to fool the felines with other similar-sounding nouns.
The researchers recorded their own voices and the voice of the cat’s owner saying five words: the first four words were the similar-sounding nouns, while the fifth word was the cat’s name.
In this way, the scientists were able to conclude that the cats responded to their name if they ignored the recordings of other words, since they moved their ears or head when they heard their name. However, cats rarely respond with enthusiasm, for example by wagging their tail or body or using their voice.
Also, cats that showed weak responses to other nouns that sounded similar to their names were significantly more likely to show strong responses when hearing their own names.
On the other hand, as scientists point out, an unresponsive cat can still recognize its name. “Their lack of response may be due to their low level of motivation to interact with humans, or their feelings at the time of the experiment,” Saito argued.
The researchers analyzed data from 77 different cats, dividing the experiments carried out into four. Thus, the analyzed cats were between six months and 17 years old and were mostly mixed breeds. Most of the cats had been spayed and all were indoor cats.
