A study has found for the first time that cats are able to understand and follow human gaze – an ability in animals that has only ever been observed before in dogs.
The research from Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) in Budapest tested domestic cats for their ability to follow human gaze as a “referential clue”, and understand that the place where a human is looking can be significant.
Things such as establishing eye contact and then indicating a location with a gaze or using specific verbal tones to suggest something are known as “ostensive behaviours”.
The ability to read ostensive behaviours has only been observed before this study in companion dogs, who behave much like human children in their reliance on nonverbal, eye-gaze clues from their owners.
The ELTE tested 41 domestic cats using an experimenter who was a stranger to the cat; they started out with 85, but 44 of those cats were either completely unengaged or became bored during the trial.
The experimenter indicated the location of hidden food over 24 trials for each cat.
The researchers found a 70% success rate in the cats’ ability to follow human gazing cues to find hidden food.
Dr Alexander Taylor, a researcher in intelligence and cognition from the University of Auckland, told BuzzFeed News that he was surprised at the results of the study.
“This is really exciting because this is the first step to showing that cats are really attending to human body language,” he said.
This cats’ success rate didn’t rely on the type of gaze that the experimenters used – both momentary eye gaze from the experimenter or dynamic, repeated gaze appeared to lead the cats in the right direction.
Vocal cues didn't seem to have an impact on this success rate – even though dogs seem to respond better with auditory indications.
While cat cognition has been relatively understudied compared to other domesticated animals such as dogs and horses, research has found they are able to understand pointing and also recognise their owner’s voice.
Taylor said that cats have not been studied as much as dogs in the past due to the difficulty of getting them to cooperate.
“I’ve heard a few legendary stories about drop-out rates of cats ... essentially people spending months of their lives training cats to do various tasks and then making slight adjustments and suddenly finding that the cats don’t want to do it anymore and that’s it,” he said.
“You really have to credit the authors [of the ELTE study] here, this is very clearly a hard slog.”
Taylor said it is now a matter of trying to understand whether this behaviour in cats is learnt throughout a cat’s lifetime or if it’s a trait that has evolved over 10,000 years of domestication.
“That’s going to be amazing because that means there's going to be a bunch of super fun studies with kittens, so there’ll probably be a lot of people queuing up to play with kittens. I think I’d quite like to do that research.”