Don’t think your cat isn’t listening: researchers say cats can learn each other’s names, not just their own

Birds with vocal chords that mimic ours can learn a wide variety of words, and some are said to know their meanings as well. Even monkeys taught to sign language understand the meaning of words, and more recently dogs have been found to be able to learn the names of up to 12 toys in a week - but what about cats?

Language is key to communicating with each other, and sometimes animals understand what we want to say. Since dogs and cats have been our companions for a very long time, it is not surprising that they sometimes understand our words. A Japanese research group claims that this extends to felines’ ability to recognize other cats’ names. Let’s see how can cats learn names.

Do they know each other’s names?

According to Saho Takagi, a PhD student at Kyoto University, if cats understand human words beyond the names we give them, it might seem logical that they would also remember the names of their fellow cats living in the same household. Takagi and his co-authors tested this ability with kitties who are living in a household with at least two other cats and with cat cafe residents as well.

The study is based on the assumption that cats express their surprise by staring longer at unexpected events or things. The same reaction can be observed in infants. Some non-human species seem to react the same way, so the idea is certainly plausible.

How the research was conducted

Takagi played a recording of the owner repeating four times the name of a cat who lives in the same household as the tested kitty. Then he showed picture of the animal. One cat completed only the first trial and then ran out of the room. The others completed four trials, two of which matched the photo and the name, and two of which did not. When the picture represented the named cat, subjects looked away faster, as if they were bored with the predicted outcome.

However, the difference was only observed among those living in house, not among the individuals who lived in cat cafes. The authors’ explanation is that because many cats share the same space, cat cafe residents don’t hear each other’s names often enough to remember them.

Do you know the names of their owners?

Skeptics might say that 19 cats was too small a sample and the results just barely reached statistical significance. However, the longer the cats lived with each other and their owner, the more convincing the results were. The authors repeated the study using human names and faces, but observed no outliers outside of a small subpopulation. The kittens who lived in larger families seemed to know the names of their owners the most. People tend to say each other’s names more often in a smaller household.

This is not Takagi’s first major breakthrough in feline intelligence. Last year, he was the first author of a study that examined a cat’s ability to map the spatial location of their person or a familiar cat. Takagi and his co-authors reported that the cats were surprised when speakers played the voice of the person feeding them, even though the person was away. He previously studied how cats understand the laws of physics.