Does your cat know what you are feeling? It can read your facial expressions!

Have you ever wondered how cats see people? Can they recognize faces and remember us? Do they feel any sense of absence without their owners? Do we have a cats or do they actually keep us? Despite the fact that countless studies have already pointed to the cognitive ability of dogs, science has not really dealt with cats so far. However, recent research suggests that cats do have emotional intelligence.

The cognitive abilities of cats – the mental processes involved in knowing, learning and understanding things – have not really been investigated until now. However, in the last 10 years, the amount of research aimed at better understanding these mysterious, almost mystical creatures, has increased significantly. Let’s see if cats can understand human mimicry or not!

Investigating the cognitive abilities of cats

Ramona Marek, author of Cats for the GENIUS, believes that cats are actually some of the smartest creatures in the animal kingdom. However, for a long time it was a rather serious problem that most of the information about feline intelligence came from the anecdotes of owners and from the few studies done on cats.

This turned out to be quite insufficient to draw more serious conclusions about the cognitive abilities of these animals. However, Ramona believes that cats can learn from observation and action in a similar way to humans. Moreover, these memories remain for up to 10 years, as their memory is extremely sharp. This is due to the fact that animals are able to associate the memory of an event or a place with emotions that they experienced in the environment of the memory. However, to this day, it turns out to be a cardinal question whether these animals are so generously blessed in the field of social skills as well?

Testing social skills

In 1998, Ádám Miklósi, a cognitive ethologist at ELTE, published a study in which he examined the ability of dogs to understand human gestures. His discovery revolutionized the way we learn about animals now. It helped confirm that domesticated animals such as dogs are worthy of more serious study. Later on, researchers found that baboons are able to recognize emotions on people’s faces and understand the components of speech. However, in 2005, science reached a huge turning point, as they compared the communication between cats and dogs with humans.

During the study, the pets were tested in their own environment, and surprisingly, the cats performed just as well as the dogs. However, the investigations were made significantly more difficult by the stubbornness of the former. Because while the dogs sat through a test without any problems, the cats often just walked away or simply refused to cooperate any further. In fact, the huge discovery ran into a dead end, as almost all ethologists gave up on testing cats.

The big breakthrough

Research on the social cognition of cats began to appear slowly. Scientists increasingly came to the conclusion that cats are capable of performing socially in the same way as dogs. For example, ethologist Péter Pongrácz and his team proved that cats can follow the human gaze in a similar way to dogs. By the way, this is very significant, because in the animal world animals do not look at each other. For them eye contact is actually a sign of attack. Thus, the results showed that cats have evolved to be capable of complex communication with humans. Ramona also sees the situation similarly. In her opinion, cats have excellent abilities in terms of learning new information and are able to connect new information with old ones.

Do cats recognise human emotions?

The International Cat Care asked dr. Naima Kasbaoui, a member of the cat welfare board at iCatCare, to review a research by Angelo Quaranta investigating how well cats can match visual and vocal information from cats and humans. In other words, they were curious about how well the ability to recognize emotions works in their case.

According to Dr. Kasbaoui, it has been proven that cats can recognize their own kind. Either by smelling and identifying their unique chemical profile, but they can also do this by hearing. Furthermore, they can distinguish between familiar and unfamiliar people and recognize human faces and voices and mentally match the two. But can they recognize emotions? Do they know when a person or a cat is angry or happy?

The study of emotion cognition

Researchers from the Department of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Bari in Italy thought it would be worth investigating whether cats can recognize happy facial expressions. First, they recorded the sounds of a male and a female cat, each in two situations. In the first they hissed and in the second they purred. Then a man and a woman were recorded laughing and grunting. Finally, a neutral sound was also downloaded from the Internet. The authors then took photographs of the same cats hissing and purring. And of the people who made “angry faces” and “happy faces.”

Ten cats were tested in their own homes, in a quiet room. A projection screen was installed and a speaker was placed behind the screen. The cats turned towards the screen and sat on their owner’s lap. Each trial consisted of a fixed tone (angry, neutral, or happy) emitted by the loudspeaker while two faces were simultaneously projected onto the lower corners of the screen. If the sound was hissing or purring, “hissing cat face” and “purring cat face” were projected. If the sound was laughing or growling, “happy face” and “angry face” were projected.

The question was that can cats match voice and face. They recorded the amount of time they spent looking at each face. Plus also described a range of behaviors that could be seen as expressions of stress or discomfort. The researchers looked at which face the cat would look at the longest.

This is the result

The researchers concluded that cats looked significantly longer at faces whose facial expressions matched the voice they heard. They also found that younger kittens were better at this task than their older counterparts. In terms of “stress behaviour”, they found that cats showed much more “stress behaviour” in response to negative emotional reactions. According to the conclusion, cats are able to interpret facial expressions and can connect the combination of human voices and facial expressions, and are even able to determine certain emotions.