Different animals have been found to respond to pointing gestures (Krause et al., 2018), but what about cats?
Pointing comprehension is likely to be learned (Miklósi & Soproni, 2006), with humans typically understanding pointing towards the end of their first year of life (Woodward & Guajardo, 2002). Yet, given the role of learning, it may be surprising that non-domesticated mammals have also demonstrated the ability to follow human pointing cues, including dolphins (Herman et al., 1999), elephants (Smet & Byrne, 2013), and bats (Hall et al., 2011). However, our fellow great apes are less successful in reading our pointing cues (Kirchhofer et al., 2012), although apes reared in complex environments outperformed those from typical environments (Russell et al., 2011).
If animals can learn to understand human pointing then it would be expected that ‘domestic’ animals are more likely to follow our signals, and this, generally, is the case. Domesticated goats (Nawroth et al., 2020), pigs (Nawroth et al., 2016), and horses (Proops et al., 2010) have all been found to follow human pointing and, as you might expect, dogs appear to have particularly good comprehension (Bhattacharjee et al., 2020; Bräuer et al., 2006; Soproni et al., 2002; Tauzin et al., 2015). Family-owned pet pooches also outperform those from kennels and shelters (D’Aniello et al., 2017; Lazarowski & Dorman, 2015), but the ability of wild dogs - such as wolves, coyotes and foxes – to respond to human pointing, suggests that learning may be occurring in different ways. Whilst it’s possible that there is some rapid learning, it is likely that human and canine co-evolution may have shaped the dogs’ socio-cognitive skills (Hare et al., 2002).
But what about cats? Can they read our pointing gestures?
Mäses & Wascher (2022) replicated earlier findings (Miklósi et al., 2005) to show that cats are indeed sensitive to human pointing. In the Mäses & Wascher (2022) study, two types of pointing gestures - momentary ipsilateral, direct pointing and momentary (for one second) cross-body pointing - were shown to nine rescue cats. The cats, given a two-way object-choice task, chose correctly 74.4% of the time, significantly above chance in both the ipsilateral and cross body pointing conditions in a two-way choice task. No significant difference in performance was found between ipsilateral pointing and cross-body pointing.
Whilst the cats studied were from a shelter, little information is known about their rearing, so it may be that humans had influenced learning. Nevertheless, as with Miklósi et al.’s (2005) findings, the suggestion that the more solitary cats’ ability to follow human pointing is comparable with a dog’s seems surprising. Domestication is likely to have selected for socio-cognitive abilities, enabling domesticated species to better communicate with humans compared with wild species (Hare et al., 2002). However, considering both their ancestors and modern versions, cats are less social (Bradshaw, 2016) than dogs so their ability to follow a human pointing gesture may come down to dogs and cats having similar levels of intelligence and basic needs. Dogs perform better when the purpose of following a gesture is to gain human attention, but when pointing relates to an object of interest, cats may do just as well.
References
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