Do Cats Really Know Their Names?
“Hey, Dusty! Heyyyyyy!” Like us, some cat paw-rents are probably used to being ignored or given a dismissive flick of the tail when you call out to your little one. And after some time, you start to wonder: Do cats even know their names? Despite sharing more than 10,000 years with these little ones, there’s very little research done to determine the answer to this question.
Fortunately, that’s exactly what behavioral scientist Atsuko Saito thought - which pioneered a new study on whether or not cats can discriminate their names from other words. A series of four experiments were carried out and involved a cohort of seventy-eight cats from ordinary Japanese households and one cat cafe.
In separate experiments, the cats were played recordings of their owners or strangers saying:
- Four random words that sounded like their name, followed by their name (test stimulus).
- Four of their siblings’ names, followed by their name (test stimulus).
The Findings
The team found that many cats actually displayed a meaningful response to their own names - even when these were uttered by strangers. As a whole, the cat-icipants tended to zone out on the neutral nouns but perked right back at the sound of their names. These interactions were recorded on video and analysed to detect subtle responses such as head movements or swishing tails.
The studies were repeated across single and multi-cat households as well as the cat cafe, and offered compelling evidence that cats can indeed distinguish their names from other words. This held true across the entire cat cohort, with the exception that name recognition appeared to be poorer for kitties from the cat cafe - only three out of nine cats showed a heightened response to their names.
The researchers speculated that the social environment of the cafe could have contributed to this disparity as it is common for the kitties there to hear visitors call out different names at the same time.
As a whole, this study doesn’t actually prove that cats understand the concept of a name - only that “the name” is typically associated with rewards such as food or petting. And if statistics are anything to go by, it seems like we’re being ignored on purpose. In actual fact, fewer than 10% of the cat-icipants made an effort to get up despite showing clear signs of name recognition.
“Hey, Dusty!”
Oh well, it’ll probably be faster if we go to her instead.