Department of Cognitive and Behavioral Science, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the University of Tokyo, 3-8-1 Komaba, Meguro-ku, Tokyo, Japan.
Department of Childhood Education, Musashino University, 1-1-20 Shinmachi, Nishitokyo-shi, Tokyo, Japan.
Sci Rep. 2019 Apr 4;9(1):5394. doi: 10.1038/s41598-019-40616-4.
Two of the most common nonhuman animals that interact with humans are domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) and cats (Felis catus). In contrast to dogs, the ability of domestic cats to communicate with humans has not been explored thoroughly. We used a habituation-dishabituation method to investigate whether domestic cats could discriminate human utterances, which consisted of cats' own names, general nouns, and other cohabiting cats' names. Cats from ordinary households and from a 'cat café' participated in the experiments. Among cats from ordinary households, cats habituated to the serial presentation of four different general nouns or four names of cohabiting cats showed a significant rebound in response to the subsequent presentation of their own names; these cats discriminated their own names from general nouns even when unfamiliar persons uttered them. These results indicate that cats are able to discriminate their own names from other words. There was no difference in discrimination of their own names from general nouns between cats from the cat café and household cats, but café cats did not discriminate their own names from other cohabiting cats' names. We conclude that cats can discriminate the content of human utterances based on phonemic differences.
两种与人类互动最常见的非人类动物是家犬（Canis familiaris）和猫（Felis catus）。与狗不同，家猫与人类交流的能力尚未得到充分探索。我们使用习惯化-去习惯化方法来研究家猫是否能够辨别人类的话语，这些话语包括猫的名字、普通名词和其他同居猫的名字。来自普通家庭和“猫咖啡馆”的猫参加了实验。在来自普通家庭的猫中，对四个不同的普通名词或四个同居猫的名字进行连续呈现后，对随后呈现自己的名字表现出明显的反应反弹；这些猫甚至在不熟悉的人说出它们的名字时也能将自己的名字与普通名词区分开来。这些结果表明，猫能够将自己的名字与其他单词区分开来。来自猫咖啡馆的猫和家庭猫在从普通名词中区分自己的名字方面没有差异，但咖啡馆的猫不能将自己的名字与其他同居猫的名字区分开来。我们得出的结论是，猫可以根据音位差异来区分人类话语的内容。
