Animal behavior: Cats can understand their own names

Journal:
Atsuko Saito, Kazutaka Shinozuka, Yuki Ito, Toshikazu Hasegawa
Published: 2019/04/04
Digital Identification Number: 10.1038/s41598-019-40616-4
Original Link:
Scientific Reports A study of 78 cats found that cats can distinguish their names from spoken words.
Saito and colleagues examined whether cats could distinguish their names from other nouns or other cat names. Previous studies have shown that dogs can respond to verbal instructions in humans, but the cat's ability to understand verbal instructions has yet to be understood. The authors studied 78 cats from Japanese families and a "cat cafe." In the test, a researcher or cat owner would say four different words and the cat's own name. Name recognition is defined as the ability of a cat to react to its own name - by moving its ears, head or tail or making sounds, and by reacting to the first word it hears, but by being less responsive to other words before its name appears (a phenomenon known as habitualism). These cats can distinguish their names from words that are the same length and accented as their own names.
found that even from the voices of strangers, the cats were able to tell their names from other words. Cafe cats and house cats have similar ability to identify their names from common nouns, but cafe cats are less likely to distinguish their names from the names of other cats that live together. The authors argue that this behavior may be due to the fact that coffee-cafe cats hear their names repeatedly appear with the names of their cohabiting companions, which allows them to link all names to rewards or punishments, not just their own.
summary: Two of the most common nonhuman animals that interact with with human domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) and cats (Felis catus). In contrast to dogs, the ability of domestic cats to communicate with humans has not been explored thoroughly. We used a habituation-dishabituation method to investigate whether domestic cats could discriminate human utterances, which consisted of cats’ own names, general nouns, and other cohabiting cats’ names. Cats from ordinary households and from a ‘cat café’ participated in the experiments. Among cats from ordinary households, cats habituated to the serial presentation of four different general nouns or four names of cohabiting cats showed a significant rebound in response to the subsequent presentation of their own names; these cats discriminated their own names from general nouns even when unfamiliar persons uttered them. These results indicate that cats are able to discriminate their own names from other words. There was no difference in discrimination of their own names from general nouns between cats from the cat café and household cats, but café cats did not discriminate their own names from other cohabiting cats’ names. We conclude that cats can discriminate the content of human utterances based on phonemic differences.
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