They might appear aloof and indifferent to what we do – but cats actually play close attention when we speak and can even beat babies at a word association game, a study suggests.
A small team of animal scientists at Azabu University in Japan have found that common house cats are capable of linking human words with images without prompting or reward.
They enlisted the assistance of 31 adult house cats who were each given a word test originally designed for babies.
All participants saw two short animated cartoons played on a laptop screen and a different made-up word accompanied each clip.
At most a cat saw each cartoon eight times. They had a short break before being shown the videos again but with some featuring the ‘wrong’ nonsense word.
Analysis showed the cats appeared visibly perplexed, spending about a third longer looking at the screen when the wrong word was spoken.
The authors said they believe this shows they had learned to link the original phrases with the images they had seen.
Previous studies suggest that babies behave similarly but take longer to make the connections between words and picture – needing to see the original cartoons between 16 and 20 times.
Author Saho Takagi said: ‘Cats pay attention to what we say in everyday life-and try to understand us-more than we realize.’
The findings were published in the journal Scientific Reports.
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