Scientists have already studied how dogs respond to people's behavior and speech. But researchers are just scratching the surface of human-cat interactions. House eats do appear to respond to the expressions on people's faces. Cats can also tell different human voices. But can cats recognize their own names?
Saito, a psychologist at Sophia University in Tokyo, and her colleagues decided to find the answer. They asked the owners of 77 cats to say four nouns of similar length followed by the cat's name Cats gradually lost interest with each random (随机的) noun. But when the owner said a cat's name, the cats reacted strong. They moved their ears, head or tail, changed their back paw position. And, of course, they meowed.
These findings mean that cats join the ranks of animals that have shown some sort of response in experiments to the names people give them. Those animals include dogs, dolphins, apes and parrots. It's hard to compare across species, though. Some dogs, for example, can tell the difference between hundreds of human words.
The study makes a strong case that cats are perfectly capable of recognizing their own names. Getting a treat or hugs as a reward is part of how cats learn to recognize a name. However, owners may also use their cat's name in a negative setting, like yelling at Fluffy to get off the stove. As a result, cats can probably learn to associate these familiar utterances with good and bad experiences, Saito notes. And that might not be great for cat-human relations. So only using a cats name in a positive context and using a different term in a negative context could help cats and humans communicate more clearly.
So cats may recognize their names. But will they come when called? Don't get your hopes up.
