How Do Cats Know Where You Are, Even If They Can’t See You?

Mysterious abilities of cats

This discovery shows that cats’ cognition marks something called “object permanence,” meaning they determine that something can still exist even if they can’t see it. While previous studies have demonstrated this cognitive ability in the humble house cat (Felis catus), this is a recent discovery in determining how hearing may play a role in tracking their environment and moving objects within it.

The task of pinpointing the science behind the creepy properties of cats fell to cat owner Saho Takagi of Kyoto University in Japan. For a new paper published in the journal PLOS ONE, Takagi and colleagues put 50 cats to the test. The cats consisted of pets and cats cared for in cat cafes.

They wanted to see if cats exhibited a trait called socio-spatial cognition, in which an animal mentally follows where others are. This property can be acquired by several senses (for example, you may “feel” someone coming without seeing or even hearing), but for the purposes of this study, the researchers were studying sound.

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The cats were placed alone in a room with one window, two doors and equipped with cameras for observation. Speakers were placed outside the room to play recordings of a stranger’s voice, an owner’s voice, a cat’s voice familiar to the cat being tested, or non-social sounds (general electrical noises). These were then played at the same location or in varying locations to see how the cats responded to the sounds being “teleported” or being still as the sound moved between the speakers.

Analysis of the video recordings later revealed that the cats were less surprised when their owners’ voices came from the same speaker – and thus from the same place – but were less surprised when their owners’ voices were suddenly switched to a different location/speaker. If you are not familiar with the expression of a confused cat, it is usually observed with a sudden ear twitch.

“The results showed that cats were surprised when their owners appeared to be ‘teleported’ to a new, unexpected place, but did not respond in the same way when tested with non-social stimuli,” the study authors wrote. “These results suggest that cats carry a mental representation of the invisible owner and from the owner’s voice, showing evidence of socio-spatial cognition, mapping the owner’s location.”