Cats use mental maps to track your movements, reveals new research

What do you think your pet cat will do after you leave?

Imagine you and your cat in your bedroom. Let’s say your cat is snuggling in a deep, comforting bliss, pressed against your lap, and you decide to get up and walk out of the room.

The answers to these questions lie beyond the results of one study involving cats.

Kittens follow their owners with their voices

(Image: SAM YEH/AFP photo via Getty Images)
This photo taken on October 27, 2021 shows a resident cat looking at Mao Thai Thai cat cafe in New Taipei City. – 15 cat residents of Mao Thai Thai cat cafe in Taiwan are among taste test volunteers sampling a new cat food that contains a rather unusual base ingredient – silkworm pupae.

According to the most recent scientific analysis, a person’s kitten has a psyche navigate their owner’s spatial location based on audible cues in the surrounding environment, including appropriate acoustic qualities, on a given cognitive state.

Certain different types of knowledge and insight into the whereabouts of others is a type of knowledge that is considered social spatial intelligence, in which pets keep a psychological record of the possible locations of others.

Unfortunately, it’s not clear how good such a skill is in kittens.

Although experts and researchers in Japan have conducted what is most likely an experiment to investigate the phenomenon.

Kyoto Academy investigators worked with dozens of local animals, mainly from domestic kittens as well as from cat cafes.

Furthermore, the experts placed each cat in a setting where the creature was comfortable and placed a Bluetooth Connector in this area and another transmitter installed from outer space.

After a while, the next kitten performed a series of noise and positional methods to test the kitten’s social-spatial competence.

Of which, the more revealing example is an audio recording of the pet owner from one of the devices, followed by an identical clip from another device a few seconds later.

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Great performance of cats when tracking owners

The authors note in the paper, “The findings demonstrated that kittens were surprised when their owners seemed to be flung into a new and obscure direction.”

Emphasize that the cats probably did not respond in the same way when familiar cat voice sounds or artificial noises were played through the devices.

Studies have yet to reveal whether kittens are shocked by their owners’ presence in a surprising area or by their absence from the predicted location, experts and scholars say. work in research.

“Our findings demonstrate that kittens have a visual image of their invisible owners and are able to pinpoint their boss’s location based on their owner’s sounds, demonstrating intelligence that is not social space.”

Upcoming difficult displacement tests could be fitted to provide some light on this.

The authors conclude: “As a result, cats map their owner’s location perception from their voice to a motion that approximates the motion observed during the sensory motor phase.” the authors conclude.

“Additional investigations of undetectable displacement, as well as similar investigations of several other organisms, can be obtained from the use of acoustic vibrations.”

“An essential component of sophisticated thinking and a key element of intelligence is consciously describing the external environment and dynamically changing those descriptions.”

For now, all we really understand is that these cats are clearly watching us.

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