ArticleAnimal cognition2020
Cats show an unexpected pattern of response to human ostensive cues in a series of A-not-B error tests.
Article in Animal cognition, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed, 23 citations in OpenAlex.
- Human ostension enhances attentiveness but not performance in domestic pigs.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Do ostensive verbal signals have a unique importance when communicating with dogs?Evolutionary human sciences · 2025Article
- Object permanence in domestic cats (Felis catus) using violation-of-expectancy by owner and stranger.PloS one · 2025Article
- Cats are (almost) liquid!-Cats selectively rely on body size awareness when negotiating short openings.iScience · 2024Article
- You talkin' to me? Functional breed selection may have fundamentally influenced dogs' sensitivity to human verbal communicative cues.BMC biology · 2024Article
- Dogs outperform cats both in their testability and relying on human pointing gestures: a comparative study.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Relationship between asymmetric nostril use and human emotional odours in cats.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Cats Did Not Change Their Problem-Solving Behaviours after Human Demonstrations.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2023Article
- Discrimination of cat-directed speech from human-directed speech in a population of indoor companion cats (Felis catus).Animal cognition · 2023Article
- Companion Cats Show No Effect of Trial-and-Error Learning Compared to Dogs in a Transparent-Obstacle Detour Task.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2022Article
- Comparing Pears to Apples: Unlike Dogs, Cats Need Habituation before Lab Tests.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2022Article
- Cats learn the names of their friend cats in their daily lives.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Cognition and the human-animal relationship: a review of the sociocognitive skills of domestic mammals toward humans.Animal cognition · 2022Review
- Pet-directed speech improves horses' attention toward humans.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Temperament in Domestic Cats: A Review of Proximate Mechanisms, Methods of Assessment, Its Effects on Human-Cat Relationships, and One Welfare.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2020Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
It is an intriguing question whether cats' social understanding capacity, including the sensitivity to ostensive signals (resulting in fast preferential learning of behavioural choices demonstrated by humans), would be comparable to that in dogs. In a series of A-not-B error tests, we investigated whether the ostensive or non-ostensive manner of human communication and the familiarity of the human demonstrator would affect the search error pattern in companion cats. Cats' performance showed an almost completely different distribution of perseverative erring than earlier was shown in dogs and human infants. Cats demonstrated perseverative errors both during ostensive and non-ostensive cueing by the owner and also during non-ostensive cueing by the experimenter. However, unlike prior studies with dogs, they avoided perseverative errors during the experimenter ostensive cueing condition. We assume that the reliance on human ostensive signals may serve different purpose in companion dogs and cats-meanwhile in dogs, human ostension could support fast rule learning, in cats, it may have only a circumstantial attention-eliciting effect. Our results highlight the need of conducting further throughout experiments on the social cognition of cats, based on their own right beside the traditional cat-dog comparative approach.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.