The cats watched and listened to the videos until they lost interest. Their boredom was signaled by a 50 percent decrease in eye contact with the screen.
After giving the animals a short break, the team placed them in front of the screens once again and ran the same two images four more times. But during this round, half the images were shown with the wrong word audio—parumo for the unicorn and keraru for the sun.
The researchers noticed that the cats spent 33 percent more time staring at the screen than during the first broadcast.
“Some cats even gazed at the screen with their pupils dilated during the ‘switched’ condition,” said Saho Takagi, a comparative cognitive scientist at Azabu University. “It was cute to see how seriously they participated in the experiment.”
These were signs that the cats were confused by the reversal of spoken words and were trying hard to find an explanation. It is evidence that the cats had associated the words with the images even when no reward was offered.
The finding suggests that cats pay attention to what humans say and associate words with objects in their environment.
The study was published in the journal Scientific Reports.
