When hunting for prey, cats have been found to not only understand the principle of cause and effect, they also use certain elements of physics.
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Researchers from Kyoto University investigated whether cats could infer the presence of a hidden object and predict its appearance based on auditory stimuli.
Takagi said that the cats were using a causal-logical understanding of noise and sounds when anticipating the presence of objects they can not see, writing in their study, “The results suggest that cats used a causal-logical understanding of auditory stimuli to predict the appearance of invisible objects”.
“Cats use a causal-logical understanding of noise or sounds to predict the appearance of invisible objects”, said lead author Saho Takagi, from the University of Kyoto, in a statement.
After analyzing each video, the researchers found that the furry creatures stared longer at the container when it made a noise, as they could predict that there was an object inside.
The team analyzed and recorded thirty domestic cats while they were being presented with a shaken container to gather the information. The wild ones often used this ability to determined where they preys could be from sounds alone because they stake out places of poor visibility.
The researchers noticed that the cars looked longer at the containers which were shaken along with a sound. When the noisy containers were then introduced to the cats, the felines were more than curious to see what was enclosed in them. Based on sound created by shaking, cats were able to predict the location of prey.
The same researchers are now trying to determine if a cat’s sense of hearing also enables it to guess an object’s shape and size. Most recently, researchers tested whether cats could anticipate an object’s presence in a box based on the sound made when shaking the box.
Researchers suggest a cats’ surroundings influence their ability to find out information based on what they hear and their natural hunting style may favour the ability to listen for sounds.
In other words, 50 percent of the time, the container rattled and contained an object, just like you’d expect.
Twenty-two cats from Japanese cat cafes and eight domestic cats were carried off to separate rooms to take part in an experiment which supposedly tested their abilities to understand gravity.
These skills help cats and other felines to hunt, especially at night time when their vision is limited.
Only two of the four scenarios – a rattling box yielding an object and a silent box yielding nothing – complied with physics.
This suggests that cats used a physical law to infer the existence (or absence) of objects based on whether they heard a rattle (or not).
In some cases, the experimental conditions lined up with the laws of physics – if there was no sound during the shaking, no object would fall out of the container, but if there had been a sound, an object would appear.
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Chances are, your average house cat has never heard of Sir Isaac Newton or his famous Third Law of Physics.
