According to a new study, your cat can recognize his or her own name

According to a new study, your cat can recognize his or her own name According to a new study, your cat can recognize his or her own name Results published in the journal  Scientific Reports  suggest cats can, in fact, distinguish their name from other sounds, even if they don’t actually grasp the concept of identity.The science behind name recognitionThe Japanese researchers involved in the study examined animals in four different experiments-some experiments conducted in the cat’s home and others conducted at cat cafes.  Follow Ladders on Flipboard!Follow Ladders’ magazines on Flipboard covering Happiness, Productivity, Job Satisfaction, Neuroscience, and more!In these experiments, the researchers used the cats’ owners’ voices in some situations and a stranger’s voice in others. All human participants began by speaking four different words to accommodate the cats to sounds being spoken and then the participants would speak the cat’s name.In one version of the experiment, the researchers played a recording of the cat’s owner saying the four different words, with a 15-second pause between each word. In another version of the experiment, the recording would mix in names of other cat’s that lived in their house with four different nouns. These variations were tested with strangers’ voices as well.The results were made clear in all four experiments conducted within the house of the cats. The majority of the cats featured in the study moved their head or perked their ears when their names were spoken, irrespective of the previously mentioned variables.“We conclude that cats can discriminate the content of human utterances based on phonemic differences. This is the first experimental evidence showing cats’ ability to understand human verbal utterances,” the researchers wrote.Because the four words chosen in each experiment were all nouns with the same length and accents as the cat’s own name, the researchers could determine a definitive link between the cats  perking up and name recognition.Cats got your tongueThere were some considerable exceptions when these experiments w ere conducted at cat cafes, however. Cats residing in cat cafes could reliably make distinctions between nouns and their name, but not between their names and the names of other cats.This seems to suggest that cats identify the sound of a name as the precursor to either a treat or some kind of reprimand or task. This is what the researchers refer to as “salient stimulus,” meaning cats form phonetic links between their names and “rewards, such as food, petting, and play.”You might also enjoy… New neuroscience reveals 4 rituals that will make you happy Strangers know your social class in the first seven words you say, study finds 10 lessons from Benjamin Franklin’s daily schedule that will double your productivity The worst mistakes you can make in an interview, according to 12 CEOs 10 habits of mentally strong people