Sancho Is Listening
For the love of Abraham Lincoln, thank the gods that’s over! It would seem the last ballot has been counted and hopefully, the trillions of little “Vote for So and So” signs will soon be gone. Unfortunately, I fear the next presidential election is already beginning. But let’s try and move on, shall we? Maybe something a little lighter? With that in mind, I got to thinking during this whole never-ending election cycle, that I don’t give Sancho enough juice, as it were. I mean, he gets a couple of quotes here and there, but to be fair, I’m getting a little annoyed that his claim to fame is, “You’re an idiot.” Which, of course, means that your intrepid reporter is an idiot. And while that may be true, I certainly don’t need to hear it from a furry quadruped all the time. It should be evident to everyone by now that I hear it enough from bipeds! So, Sancho, as I listen to the great David Crosby with his band CPR (that all of you out there should listen to); this one’s for you! Feel free to interject to your tiny hearts’ content.
Just recently, thirty-one Japanese house cats participated in an experiment. Animal behavior researcher Saho Takagi recruited 23 of them from cat cafés near Tokyo, and eight friends volunteered their pets: 20 tomcats and 11 queens, most of them roughly around the age of 4. Whoa, whoa, whoa...Wait a minute! They have cat cafés in Tokyo? “Um, excuse me, miss. Can I get a double mocha Catte?” See what I did there, Boss? I need a Passport! Oh, the pain...
Takagi traveled from one cat’s home to the next. In a room familiar to each cat, she placed the feline gently onto her lap, then watched where the cats directed their attention as a monitor played back a videoclip Takagi had carefully composed. In the clip, a cartoon of a smiling red sun, complete with eyebrows, shrank and expanded into view, accompanied by the word “keraru” spoken loud and clear by the cat’s owner.
Keraru is meaningless in Japanese, kind of like “civility” in American English…You really are a dope…but Takagi believes the results of her experiment show that cats can understand human speech to a certain extent. Well, of course we can. How do you think I do this blog? I knew this was a mistake...my apologies. Anyway, when presented with the sun, the cats paid attention to the video for 3 to 5 seconds. The researchers repeated this pairing of the sun and the word “keraru” several times, to encourage habituation. But when cat owners later spoke the word “keraru” alongside a drawing of a blue unicorn smashing through a building, Takagi found that cats stared at the screen for longer than usual, as if surprised that “keraru” had so dramatically changed appearance. She believes they had learned to associate the word “keraru” with the image of the sun.
Keraru is meaningless in Japanese, kind of like “civility” in American English…You really are a dope…but Takagi believes the results of her experiment show that cats can understand human speech to a certain extent. Well, of course we can. How do you think I do this blog? I knew this was a mistake...my apologies. Anyway, when presented with the sun, the cats paid attention to the video for 3 to 5 seconds. The researchers repeated this pairing of the sun and the word “keraru” several times, to encourage habituation. But when cat owners later spoke the word “keraru” alongside a drawing of a blue unicorn smashing through a building, Takagi found that cats stared at the screen for longer than usual, as if surprised that “keraru” had so dramatically changed appearance. She believes they had learned to associate the word “keraru” with the image of the sun.
The study borrows its lively methodology from experiments probing cognition in human babies, who at 14 months appear to be able to make associations between words and objects, and, much like the cats, also pay closer attention to a screen when these associations are challenged during the course of a study.
A behavioral scientist researching animal cognition at Azabu University in Japan, Takagi is convinced that domestic cats are adapting to life with their human companions in surprising ways. Oh, please. We'll adapt to anything that feeds us, has a nice couch, and a litter box. How much money was wasted on this project? The results from her study, published recently in Scientific Reports (a subsidiary of Nature magazine), also show a difference in attention that cats pay to the videos depending on whether the accompanying words are narrated by their human owners, or produced electronically. The cats paid closer attention to incongruent image-sound pairings when humans spoke the words. Which means we're smarter than dogs!!
“Cats may have acquired the ability to associate objects or images with spoken words through their cohabitation with humans,” says Tagaki. “Humans, among animal species, have a particularly rich capacity for vocal communication, especially symbolic communication through language. Being in close contact with such a species...cats that were better at symbolic communication may have been more favored” over time, she explains.
Part of her hypothesis is that domestication played a role in pushing for the evolution of this behavior in cats. Similar findings exist for pet dogs, who on average understand 89 spoken words, but this is less surprising since dogs are thought to have been domesticated specifically to respond to human commands. Cats are a more enigmatic case (as all cat owners can attest to), since their domestication would have brought few clear benefits to humans beyond a fondness for snacking on snakes and mice.
The new findings build on previous research that suggests cats are adept at deciphering human communication. Takagi’s studies have shown that cats can differentiate between their own name and similar-sounding nouns, whereas other groups have shown that cats follow human pointing, look for emotional cues from their familiar humans when confronted with novelty, and can tell when their owner is angry or happy. Or when their owner is an idiot, right? I suppose.
“I think the way cats have adapted to living with humans is very unique,” says Jennifer Vonk, professor of comparative cognitive psychology at Oakland University, who was not involved in the study. But Vonk is less convinced by the approach scientists are taking to understand the evolutionary changes that may have occurred through domestication. For Vonk, the inferences made are too reliant on a human-centric projection of what may be happening in our pets’ minds. “Even if we can get the [cats] to perform in the test the way we want them to, they could be using completely different thought processes,” says Vonk, “and I don’t know how good we are at deciphering what’s really going on internally.”
“A better test perhaps would be to compare domesticated cats with their feral brothers and sisters,” Vonk says. Better still, the most rigorous study would see cats separated from their mothers at birth, with some siblings exposed to humans and the rest forced to live without such contact. “But there are ethical issues with doing that type of study,” says Vonk. You think? Felines of the world unite!!! Easy, comrade...
A behavioral scientist researching animal cognition at Azabu University in Japan, Takagi is convinced that domestic cats are adapting to life with their human companions in surprising ways. Oh, please. We'll adapt to anything that feeds us, has a nice couch, and a litter box. How much money was wasted on this project? The results from her study, published recently in Scientific Reports (a subsidiary of Nature magazine), also show a difference in attention that cats pay to the videos depending on whether the accompanying words are narrated by their human owners, or produced electronically. The cats paid closer attention to incongruent image-sound pairings when humans spoke the words. Which means we're smarter than dogs!!
“Cats may have acquired the ability to associate objects or images with spoken words through their cohabitation with humans,” says Tagaki. “Humans, among animal species, have a particularly rich capacity for vocal communication, especially symbolic communication through language. Being in close contact with such a species...cats that were better at symbolic communication may have been more favored” over time, she explains.
Part of her hypothesis is that domestication played a role in pushing for the evolution of this behavior in cats. Similar findings exist for pet dogs, who on average understand 89 spoken words, but this is less surprising since dogs are thought to have been domesticated specifically to respond to human commands. Cats are a more enigmatic case (as all cat owners can attest to), since their domestication would have brought few clear benefits to humans beyond a fondness for snacking on snakes and mice.
The new findings build on previous research that suggests cats are adept at deciphering human communication. Takagi’s studies have shown that cats can differentiate between their own name and similar-sounding nouns, whereas other groups have shown that cats follow human pointing, look for emotional cues from their familiar humans when confronted with novelty, and can tell when their owner is angry or happy. Or when their owner is an idiot, right? I suppose.
“I think the way cats have adapted to living with humans is very unique,” says Jennifer Vonk, professor of comparative cognitive psychology at Oakland University, who was not involved in the study. But Vonk is less convinced by the approach scientists are taking to understand the evolutionary changes that may have occurred through domestication. For Vonk, the inferences made are too reliant on a human-centric projection of what may be happening in our pets’ minds. “Even if we can get the [cats] to perform in the test the way we want them to, they could be using completely different thought processes,” says Vonk, “and I don’t know how good we are at deciphering what’s really going on internally.”
“A better test perhaps would be to compare domesticated cats with their feral brothers and sisters,” Vonk says. Better still, the most rigorous study would see cats separated from their mothers at birth, with some siblings exposed to humans and the rest forced to live without such contact. “But there are ethical issues with doing that type of study,” says Vonk. You think? Felines of the world unite!!! Easy, comrade...
That’s not to say that Vonk doubts the power of cat intelligence. “I think that cats and most animals are much better at reading our cues than we are theirs,” she says, “so I am guessing they are more skilled at understanding our language and our emotional tones and posture than we are at reading their behavior.” It couldn't be that our minds are deeper and more complicated than yours, could it? I mean, I've listened to conversations between you and your dopey friends! Complicated is not the word I'd use. Hmmm... Maybe next time, an iguana.
On the other hand, could it be that cats domesticated humans, rather than the other way around? After all this time, you finally write something intelligent. Can I go outside now? I've got some advanced astrophysics problems to solve. You're an idiot!
On the other hand, could it be that cats domesticated humans, rather than the other way around? After all this time, you finally write something intelligent. Can I go outside now? I've got some advanced astrophysics problems to solve. You're an idiot!
write to Peter: magtour@icloud.com
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