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. 2022 Apr 13;12(1):6155.
doi: 10.1038/s41598-022-10261-5.

Cats learn the names of their friend cats in their daily lives

Saho Takagi  1   2   3 , Atsuko Saito  4 , Minori Arahori  5   6 , Hitomi Chijiiwa  7 , Hikari Koyasu  8 , Miho Nagasawa  8 , Takefumi Kikusui  8 , Kazuo Fujita  7 , Hika Kuroshima  7
Affiliations

Cats learn the names of their friend cats in their daily lives

Saho Takagi et al. Sci Rep. .

Erratum in

Abstract

Humans communicate with each other through language, which enables us talk about things beyond time and space. Do non-human animals learn to associate human speech with specific objects in everyday life? We examined whether cats matched familiar cats' names and faces (Exp.1) and human family members' names and faces (Exp.2). Cats were presented with a photo of the familiar cat's face on a laptop monitor after hearing the same cat's name or another cat's name called by the subject cat's owner (Exp.1) or an experimenter (Exp.2). Half of the trials were in a congruent condition where the name and face matched, and half were in an incongruent (mismatch) condition. Results of Exp.1 showed that household cats paid attention to the monitor for longer in the incongruent condition, suggesting an expectancy violation effect; however, café cats did not. In Exp.2, cats living in larger human families were found to look at the monitor for increasingly longer durations in the incongruent condition. Furthermore, this tendency was stronger among cats that had lived with their human family for a longer time, although we could not rule out an effect of age. This study provides evidence that cats link a companion's name and corresponding face without explicit training.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no competing interests.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Diagram illustrating each condition in Exp.1. Two model cats were chosen from cats living with subject. The model cat’s name called by owner was played through the speaker built into the laptop computer (Name phase). Immediately after playback, a cat’s face appeared on the monitor (Face phase). On half of the trials the name and face matched (congruent condition), on the other half they mismatched (incongruent condition).
Figure 2
Figure 2
Time attending to the monitor during the face phase for each group in Exp.1. Red bar represents congruent condition; Blue bar represents incongruent condition. Left panel shows café cat data, right panel shows house cat data. The y-axis is log-transformed.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Violation Index for each group in Exp.1. Red boxplot (left) shows café cat data; blue boxplot (right) shows house cat data.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Time attending to the monitor during the face phase in Exp.2. Red points represent congruent condition; blue points represents incongruent condition. Each line represents a regression line predicted by the LMM. Each ribbon represents the 95% confidence interval. The y-axis is log-transformed.
Figure 5
Figure 5
Time attending to the monitor during the face phase grouped by time living together in Exp.2. We separated time living together into short and long groups by median for convenience because we found a significant interaction of time together, number of family members and congruency. Left panel represents short group; right panel represents long group. Red points represent congruent condition; blue points represent incongruent condition. Each line represents a regression line predicted by the LMM. Each ribbon represents the 95% confidence interval. The y-axis is log-transformed.
Figure 6
Figure 6
The relationship between Violation Index and number of family members. Grey area indicates the 95% confidence interval predicted by the LM.
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