Cats Can Sort of Understand the Laws of Physics, Say Scientists

Cat owners: hear me out. At some point, you've probably crawled into bed to discover a de-winged bug or dead mouse carefully tucked under the sheets, in your cat's misguided attempt at professing its love via "Surprise! I killed a thing for you!"

Gross nighttime presents aside, your cat's ability to hunt tiny things that move fast is impressive.

Part of that ability, according to scientists at Kyoto University, apparently comes from cats' understanding of physics. In an article published on June 14 in the journal Animal Cognition, Saho Tagaki and colleagues concluded that cats' hunting prowess comes in part from their understanding of cause and effect.

So how did they measure that? Short of engaging in interpretive dance, cats can't tell you what they're thinking. A common psychological work-around for studying participants who can't verbally communicate—namely, animals and babies—is observing how they respond to new versus familiar stimuli. That can mean testing how long an animal looks at an object (novel or interesting objects tend to command more attention, hence longer stares), or how vigorously a baby sucks on a pacifier that records its sucking rate.

In this experiment, researchers videotaped 30 domestic cats (a mix of house pets and cat café felines) to observe their reactions to a container with a potential object inside. First, cats observed an experimenter shake the container: the box either made a rattling sound, or was silent. In the second phase, cats watched as the experimenter turned over the box to reveal its contents—either a ball, or nothing, because the box was empty.

There were four experimental conditions: a sound paired with a ball, no sound paired with an empty box (both "congruent" conditions); versus a rattling sound paired with an empty box, or no sound paired with a ball ("non-congruent" conditions).

Researchers found that when cats encountered a condition that wasn't congruent with physical laws—for example, the box doesn't rattle but a ball falls out—they tended to look at it longer. According to their interpretation, a longer stare meant they were encountering a strange or unexpected scenario. The researchers concluded that the cats were actually deducing the presence of objects based on sound, and used physical rules to predict whether or not there was an object inside.

As for my own cats (by the way, I have three), I put this research to the test by watching them play Mouse for Cats on an iPad. For the uninitiated, it's a game that gets cats to follow and catch a squeaking mouse on a screen. With the iPad on a bed, when the mouse ran off-screen, my cats pawed at the sheets, expecting to find their hidden prey. Even when I turned off the screen, they jumped off the bed to see if the mouse had run under it. To be honest, that reasoning seemed pretty impressive.

Tagaki and his team's work brings a new perspective to cat research (a refreshing change from studies of brain-controlling parasites). As is mentioned in this paper, previous studies concluded that cats' causal understanding based on visual cues was "unsophisticated." But based on their keen sense of hearing and their tendency to hunt in low-visibility situations, this group hypothesized that to really understand how cats think, we need to test their reasoning based on sound.

It's also worth mentioning that 15 cats that originally took part in the study were excluded for being too scared to complete the task, or because they couldn't pay attention long enough to the stimuli. So if your cat isn't great at predicting its prey's location based on sound, don't feel too bad either.