It’s not only owners of cats and dogs that have long deliberated as to the comparative intelligence of the respective species, but also animal behaviourists, scientists, and even Hollywood. Strong opinions have formed on either side of the argument, with those favouring the feline pointing to their independent nature and unwillingness to kowtow to their owner’s each and every demand as a sign of their cerebral superiority, while for the canine enthusiasts it is their very trainability and ability to read our cues that place them ahead of the pack.
The situation, though, is far more nuanced than that, for any animal’s intelligence (including your own) is borne not only out of evolutionary development but also social organisation, heredity, individual upbringing, and experience.
While Felis catus has been by and large domesticated, its evolution has been far less tampered with and directed by human intervention than the loyal dog. Not only this, but a cat’s natural social organisation tends to be less structured and cohesive compared to the canine, which leads to a reduced social intelligence that inevitably impacts on its capacity or inclination to take cues from others. This does not make the cat more or less intelligent but merely different in the way that it organises its thoughts and expresses itself to the outside world.
In order to truly understand feline intelligence, one needs to sense through a cat’s eyes, nose, and ears how it perceives the world, acquires its knowledge, applies that knowledge to act upon its environment, and how it engages with those with whom it shares its space.
In order to discern feline intelligence, it’s probably best to first define what intelligence actually means. Intelligence is the manifest ability of a mind to acquire knowledge of its surroundings, formulate new paradigms based on that information, and then to apply that knowledge in a manner that produces positive results for it and/or others within a given situation. This is all done through a blend of verbal/visual comprehension (reading the thoughts and/or intentions of others) and perceptual organisation (interpreting the environment in which it is in), with the help of both working memory (recall of prior experience) and processing speed (ability to read and adapt to a changing situation).
The Mathematical Mog:
There is circumstantial evidence that cats can indeed count – just not that high! Most experts agree the average cat can count up to five or seven, which tends to be the upper range of litter size that a cat may reproduce. This ability helps the queen to know that all her young are accounted for.
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Nature is sparing with those attributes that it gifts an animal. Skill and ability are borne out of need, bestowed upon a species through natural selection. As in the example above, natural selection favoured those litters whose mothers could keep track of their offspring, and so this ability was passed on down those lines. The ability to count any higher was unnecessary, beyond simply being able to discern ‘more’ from ‘less’, hence why a cat’s arithmetic ability tends to be capped at around five or seven.
Social intelligence is also restricted in the feline, owing to its reduced sociability compared to other more socially-organised species, such as the dog, whose own social repertoire is less complex than that of its nearest relative, the wolf. This is not to say that cats have no social intelligence whatsoever, simply that it is not as deep nor as broad ranging, and hence less nuanced.
Nevertheless, cats are still able to employ their social intelligence when it comes to learning, and there is sufficient evidence to show that social learning, in which a cat will learn by observing the actions of another of its own species performing a specific task, does take place and leads to their acquiring a learned response a lot faster than by simply trying to tackle a problem on their own.
This social learning primarily takes place during kittenhood, and so it is no surprise that much of a cat’s social learning is acquired through watching its mother and siblings. In fact, when it comes to its litter mates, it is more helpful to a cat to watch its littermate acquire the response through trial and error than by simply watching it carry out a previously learned response. This latter point affirms the fact that this is learning and not simply a case of mimicry on the cat’s part.
Self Reflection in Cats:
Some argue that because cats pay scant attention to their reflections that they lack self awareness. Rather, this is probably again down to their limited social intelligence. Social creatures, like apes, birds (and humans) that rely on appearance to convey social signals are more likely to pay attention to the way they look. Cats just aren’t that bothered!
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We will cover visual/verbal comprehension as well as perceptual organisation later when we consider the cat’s senses and modes of communication, so in the meantime let us turn to their working memory and how they apply received information to produce changes and outcomes to their betterment.
A cat’s short-term memory, based on an experiment involving a cat’s sense of object permanence (knowledge that an item removed from its view still exists), equates to roughly 16 hours, after which it then quite literally becomes out of sight, out of mind. This tends to be only true for novel objects or items. For those things consistently or routinely available to it, such as its food bowl, favourite toy, or even you, its owner, this information will have been stored in its long-term memory.
There is some contradictory evidence as to whether cats understand the notion of cause and effect. While in one experiment involving a series of pulleys, one of which would, when tugged, uncover a treat, suggested that cats could not grasp this notion, another more basic example, as described below, suggests that they do in fact grasp this concept.
Effecting Change Through Action:
There are numerous stories about the cat that could open doors, including stories of other cats then learning from that cat to do the same. The first cat has usually learnt to perform this feat by watching its owner pulling down on the handle to open the door, showing that social learning in cats is not limited solely to watching conspecifics.
The act of manipulating a lever in order to achieve a desired outcome is a great illustration of cause and effect in action. More than likely, in the experiment involving pulleys, as described above in the main body of the page, the study did not take into account a cat’s need for varied and highly motivational stimulation. Cats do make notoriously difficult test subjects, hence why many such studies have proven inconclusive.
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However, cats clearly do understand correlation, as anyone would know if they tried to get their cat into a carrier to take it to the vet! Correlation is a form of association, and is a mode of processing information that is basic to most, if not all, intelligent species.
Cats come across as stoic creatures, so it may be forgiven to think that they are short on feelings, when in fact they do share a range of emotions not so dissimilar to ourselves. The truth is they simply express those emotions differently, or hide them well.
A cat’s emotions range from anger to joy, from contentment to distress, and from elation to depression. In fact, the one emotion that we place such great stock in – love – is also present in the feline, albeit apparently to a lesser degree than in our other favoured furry companion: the dog. Oxytocin is a neurotransmitter and hormone that is produced in the hypothalamus and has a range of physical and psychological effects, including influencing social behaviour and emotion, including both love and trust. A recent study suggests that more of this hormone is produced by dogs while playing with their custodians than is released by cats under similar laboratory conditions. While there is scope to question the veracity of these findings, as cats are notoriously territorial and tend not to be as relaxed in a laboratory setting as their canine counterparts, such a result is not that surprising, as cats are by their nature more independent and solitary than the socially-minded mutt. That is not to say that cats are incapable of love, as any owner would tell you when their cat gazes up at them while kneading their lap and emitting sounds of chirruping and purring. It’s just that such affection is generally more hard won than from a dog, who is more likely to spread that love around, even to strangers.
That cats do retain a level of social intelligence is beyond dispute but it is far more directed than in dogs. Social referencing has been detected in cats, as they will often look to their owner when assessing an uncertain or potentially scary situation and are more likely to explore and settle in new spaces when their owner is present. And just as they are able to express their emotions, so too are they able to read emotions in others, particularly that of their custodian. Research undertaken to explore this aspect of feline feeling has shown that a cat is more likely to approach a smiling owner than a frowning one. While dogs generalise their approachability, cats are more reserved, expressing a neutral reaction when such affiliative expressions are displayed by a stranger, which probably explains why you will get a positive response to a smile from happy-go Lucky but a flick of a tail and trot-off from Fluffy.
If it takes intelligence to make sense of the world around us, then it stands to reason how we sense our world would shape our intelligence. Our senses act not only as conduits for information but also set limits on what we are able to discern and process, leading potentially to sensory bias.
So how do feline senses compare to our own human senses, and what does that tell us about how a cat might perceive the world?
So how does a cat view the world? In some ways, their large eyes (far larger than ours relative to their body size) offer superior vision to our own, but in other respects their eyesight is also more restricted. Not only is the distance between their pupil and retina shorter than our own but their pupils can be opened much wider and closed – or in the cat’s case, narrowed – when compared to a human’s pupil. This allows them to see extremely well in both brightness and darkness. With this functionality, and with their eyes having up to six to eight times more rod cells than the human eye and a light reflective layer called the Tapetum that reflects light back through the receptors, their night vision is comparable to that of a bat!
By contracting horizontally into a slit, a cat’s pupil is able to reduce the intensity of light hitting the retina while retaining in focus the full range of colour wavelengths.
A cat’s field of vision is wider than that of a human, in that it extends 200 degrees compared to a human’s 180 degree field of vision. However, only 140 degrees of a cat’s vision is binocular, where each eye’s field of vision overlaps.
In terms of colour range, while humans’ are trichromatic, in that our retina is able to absorb red, green, and blue colour wavelengths, cats are dichromatic, as they can only see in shades of green and blue.
While a cat’s sense of smell is not as strong as that of a dog, it is nonetheless fourteen times as powerful as that of a human being. Their olfactory sense is aided by an organ known as the vomeronasal, or Jacobson’s, organ. This area of chemical receptors is located above the roof of the mouth and is designed to detect moisture-borne odours. When being used, a cat will curl back its upper lip while closing its nostrils, or ‘gape’, and literally taste the air.
A male cat uses olfaction primarily for hunting or to detect other cats, particular females in heat, and can smell either from up to ninety metres away.
A cat’s hearing is particularly acute and can detect an extremely broad range of frequencies, from the lowest tones that we can discern up to two octaves higher than we are able, which therefore pushes their frequency range well into the ultrasound.
Their auditory sense is so fine-tuned that they are not only able detect the subtle squeaks of mice and rats but are also able to discern different types of rodents based on the sound that they make.
The external part of the cat’s ear is extremely mobile, being able to rotate independently of each other, as well as being able to both stand erect and flatten, all of which allows the cat to pinpoint the exact source location and height of any specific sound.
The most obvious touch receptors on a cat is its whiskers, which, like its ears, are also extremely mobile. A cat is able to push its whiskers forward when it wants to explore an area close to its face or flatten them against its cheeks to prevent them from being damaged. They are not only used to help a cat navigate through tight spaces but also to detect things close-up, owing to their poor near-vision.
These hairs are so sensitive that they do not need to be in direct contact with an object for a cat to sense it. When air currents bend round or bounce off the surface of an object, those finely attuned vibrissae will tell him not only that the object is there but also its size, shape, and distance, as well as the speed that it might be travelling.
A cat’s whiskers are not the only sensitive hairs that a cat possesses. There are similar, finer hairs around its eyes and on the sides of its legs that aid it in gleaning information about its environment.
The Kinaesthetically Minded Cat:
A cat’s agility is another form of intelligence. Its ability to not only perch on the most slender of structures but also to right itself mid-air should it fall shows an incredible degree of bodily intelligence. Both their tail and that their clavicle bones are free-floating from their shoulders (allowing them to place one paw directly in front of the other) play important roles in their balancing acts, while the vestibular organ in their ears aid in their righting reflex.
© Durstjaz / courtesy of Shutterstock.com
It may come as a surprise to discover that cats generally don’t meow to one another, and rarely to strangers, but mainly or solely to their owners. Why is that? The cat’s meow arises during kittenhood when the little fur ball vocalises in order to attract its mother’s attention for feeding or a sibling for play. So on that basis, and while in no way scientifically verifiable, it does suggest that your otherwise solitary cat does indeed view you as a close member of its family. This may come as some small comfort to those concerned about their cat’s lack of oxytocin levels as an indicator of love, as mentioned above.
As with most animal vocalisations – including our own – the deeper the tone, the more assertive the intent. Since cat’s don’t meow out of contentment but only to tell you something, this generally means your cat is demanding or complaining about something. The higher the pitch, the more excited the expression. This may be as an invitation or greeting when the sound is short, or as an expression of pain, fear, or anger when the sound is extended.
But cats do more than simply meow. They also produce soothing sounds, such as the purr, the chirrup, and the trill. The purr is generally assumed to be less about communication as opposed to an expression of the cat’s contented inner state. However, sometimes cats purr as a means to self-sooth, so a cat that is in pain or that is stressed may also purr as a way to calm its own nerves, and it is important to distinguish the two, especially in elderly cats or those that may be ill or have undergone surgery.
Finally, cats also express themselves with growls, howls, hisses, and snarls. This basic form of expression are given as warning or threat signals when a cat does not want to be approached.
The reason why cats tend not to communicate through vocalisation is two-fold. As explained above, these are generally solitary animals that do not work or hunt together as a group or pack, and hence never needed to develop the social skills necessary to navigate within such structures . Cats are also comparatively small hunters, and since they lack the security of a group they are equally open to being prey to larger predators. Hence, unless you are with your most trusted family member, it’s probably best not to meow at all. Or in some instances if you do, then let it be a silent meow.
The silent meow is, in fact, not silent, but merely a sound that is too high-pitched to be audible to our human ears, and less likely to be heard by large predators, as well. It would, however, be audible to the natural mother, who would then take notice of their little one’s call of attention.
Cats, like dogs, are more cued to communicating via body language. So in order to make true sense of the vocalisations of a cat, one really needs to take into account the body language that accompanies it. Refer to our page on ‘Cat Body Language & Communication’ for more information.
There has been less purposeful intervention by humans in the evolutionary development of cats than there has been in dogs. Even so, there are clear differences between certain breeds, including in levels and ranges of vocalisation, sociability, and inquisitiveness. Those breeds that score high in these regards, such as the Abyssinian, Bengal, Burmese, Cornish Rex, and Siamese, we tend to think of as more intelligent. Whether they are inherently more intelligent, however, is a matter for debate.
Certainly, though, an inquisitive nature lends itself to the potential for increased boldness and sociability, and hence to a greater need for vocalisation, so it is unsurprising that these three aspects should be linked. And with increased inquisitiveness comes the risk for confronting new challenges to be solved, so a higher level of intelligence may have, in fact, come about through natural selection.
On the other hand, it is worth noting that nearly all these breeds either originated from the orient or have been interbred with breed-lines from East Asia (such as the Cornish Rex) or wild cats (such as the Bengal). These cats were not generally bred to hunt vermin and protect grain stores, as they were throughout the Middle East and later in Europe, but were rather cats of royal courts or came from the wild. Sociability would have certainly been selected for in the former case while boldness and inquisitiveness would be an asset in the latter.
Of course this is all pure conjecture, as there is no scientific way by which to test or corroborate this hypothesis, but it might help to explain why certain breeds of cat – especially the older breeds from Asia and the younger breeds from wild cats – are more predisposed to express attitudes that we deem to be signs of intelligence that other established breeds do not.
When we talk about personality, we are talking about the combination of patterns that both influence and motivate one’s behaviour, emotions, and thought. It implies both a level of consciousness and self-awareness, and for these reasons it has been traditionally considered within the sole purview of human beings, hence the person in personality.
Animals, on the other hand, are described as having ‘temperaments’, which is a more basic form of describing the influences and motivations for one’s behaviour, usually described as along a spectrum between either boldness and shyness, or extroversion and introversion. It may also include such traits as: Adaptability, distractibility, intensity, sensitivity, and persistence. As these characteristic traits engage with their environment, they give rise to the six basic emotions, namely: Anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise.
Both our temperament and our early experiences inform our habits and further learning, which all come together overtime to form our personality. Personality, therefore, is that which arises within the individual, borne out of his or her own experiences, and is generally considered to be stable both over time and through different circumstances. It encompasses characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving, commonly described in psychology by variations across five basic personality traits, known as the ‘Big Five’, which has been successfully modelled across a range of population groups in more than fifty countries.
So, do cats have personalities, or do they only have temperaments? Or is this splitting hairs (or fur)? Is it, in fact, helpful to even compare human qualities and modes of thought with those of a cat?
After all, human beings go through an extended period of maturing, from infancy through adolescence, which is just a little under the length of the average cat’s entire lifespan. So is it all that surprising humans are able to develop a keener sense of self, with the ability for greater self-reflection, and hence access to emotions such as guilt or contempt that are beyond the grasp of a cat?
Memory, as well, plays a role in personality development, and cats are far more selective about what they filter through from working to short-term, and finally long-term, memory than the average human, although our attention span, or what we hold in our working memory, tends to be roughly the same as a cat – around 10 to 16 seconds.
Human beings are social creatures, whereas cats tend to be solitary. Since a great deal of our personality is coloured by our beliefs, values, and social interactions, it could be said that a great deal of who we are is as a result of our social environment and our engagement with others. Arguably, this reduced sociability should not be seen as a reason to deny a cat it’s own personality, for we would not say another herd animal, such as a horse, as a more developed personality than a cat, but it is an argument for a different mode or type of personality.
Being human, we also have language to aid us in our recollection of past events, a fundamental aspect in the development of identity. There is not much that one can recall prior to having learnt a language, and the reason for this is that it is language that helps us to codify our experiences, to share them and to store them in our long-term memory. Cats do not have this facility. Their memories are confined to people, places, and objects, with concomitant associations based on sight, smells, and sounds.
So taking this all into account, perhaps it is time to consider that, as they develop, cats too evolve a more complex inner state than one of mere temperament, but that when contrasting that inner state to our own we are simply comparing two different modes of intelligence, two types of consciousness, each taking in the world and then expressing itself outwardly in its own unique way, and that as a result there are gradations to personality structure as opposed to a simple binary choice of there being one or none at all.
In 2012, a team of researchers investigated a small tribe of hunter-gatherers in South America and discovered within that community that only two of the “Big Five” personality traits were in fact present, suggesting that personality traits have indeed evolved over time, as our interactions with our environment and between each other became ever increasingly complex.
Perhaps, then, the risk of anthropomorphism stems not from the consideration that a cat may indeed be conscious or aware, but that by conceding that they are we therefore should feel the need to imbue it with a human sense of self. Perhaps a cat does not have a personality as we understand it, but rather another level of persona. For want of a better description, let’s simply call it ‘pussonality’.
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