Cats Can Recognize Their Own Names, Study Suggests (gizmodo.com)

AmiMoJo shares a report from Gizmodo: Plenty of cat owners will happily tell you their felines are capable of responding to their own names, but the scientific jury remains ambivalent on the matter. A fascinating new experiment suggests this might actually be true for some cats, and it's a capacity very much tied to the social environment in which the cat lives. The new research, published today in Scientific Advances, doesn't mean cats understand the human conception of a name, but it does show that at least some cats can distinguish their names from other words. Prior research has shown that cats can recognize human gestures, facial expressions, and vocal cues. Slashdot reader sciencehabit adds: Give this a shot at home: Say four random words to your cat -- separated by about 15 seconds -- with the same length and intonation as its name. Then say its actual name. If it swivels its ears or perks up its head, chances are it knows what you call it. That's essentially what researchers did in a new study. The scientists saw similar responses when the cat's name came after the names of other felines he lived with, or when a stranger spoke the words. The findings are the first to experimentally show that cats have some understanding of what we are saying to them, the team concludes.

Comments

Cats are pretty stupid,

[Anonymous Coward]

so that is quite an achievement. But they recognize the names only when you bring them food. And then they recognize any name as theirs.

Re:Cats are pretty stupid,

[Freischutz]

Re:Cats are pretty stupid, so that is quite an achievement. But they recognize the names only when you bring them food. And then they recognize any name as theirs.

Why do you consider cats stupid? Because you can't teach them tricks like a dog? In actual facts dogs are stupid because they will do cheap tricks for food out of greed. Cats could learn do those tricks too but because a cat is a very smart and cerebral creature it just can't be bothered with such simplistic food/reward teaching methods. You are mistaking that for stupidity.

Re:No surprise

[Oswald McWeany]

I don't know. My girlfriend breeds them (Russian Blues)

While cats certainly recognize words, I have seen little evidence that they're aware of their name.

Totally different experience; cats whose owners have no emotional connection to the owners and live with many other cats and hearing the names of other cats continuously as the kitten mill churns along; and a cat that is kept as a pet and develops a long emotional bond with the owner and gets lots of one on one time.

A cat that is kept as a pet and has an emotional bond with their human is going to develop deeper understanding of their human than one that is a commodity to a human and doesn't have the emotional bond.

Of course they do

[WCMI92]

As anyone who has been owned by cats knows.