At Science, Christa Lesté-Lasserre highlights an interesting fact about cats’ relationships with humans: In a recent study from Japan, researchers have shown that cats understand more than we thought they did:

… cats learn to associate images with words even faster than babies do, according to a study published this month in Scientific Reports. That means that, despite all appearances to the contrary, our furtive feline friends may actually be listening to what we say…

“I was very surprised, because that meant cats were able to eavesdrop on human conversations and understand words without any special reward-based training,” says Saho Takagi, a comparative cognitive scientist at Azabu University and member of the 2022 study. She wondered: Are cats “hard-wired” to learn human language?

“Cats beat babies at word-association game,” October 16, 2024 The paper is open access.

Well, yes and no

Cats are well adapted to hearing what’s going on in their own environment, whether it is a mouse’s footfall, a neighbor’s cat skulking around, or a human shouting “Here, kitty, kitty… ”

Knowing what is going on is usually its own reward, as humans will attest.

If what humans say typically results in actions that affect the cat, the cat will learn to pick up the signal.

For example, “Tabby, quit scratching the couch!” means that the human has detected Tabby scratching the couch. So he cannot continue to do so until the human is distracted.

Similarly, while his back is turned, he might hear the human shouting, “Fluffy, get down from there!” That means that the companion cat Fluffy has climbed to the top of the armoire again and is pawing around in the delicate china. So the human is intimidating Fluffy to make him get down. Likewise, Fluffy can’t go back up there until the human is distracted. None of this involves any type of abstraction of the sort that is beyond a cat’s understanding.

The research follows on earlier research that shows that cats can know their names and other cats’ names.

Again, we should not be surprised. Tabby knows that “Tabby!” means that something will happen to him and that “Fluffy!” means that something will happen to his companion. Cats’ ability to attend to what humans are saying is one of the reasons they became domestic companions. Whether they choose to do what humans want has always been quite another matter of course…

You may also wish to read: The real reason why only human beings speak. Language is a tool for abstract thinking—a necessary tool for abstraction—and humans are the only animals who think abstractly (Michael Egnor)