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Dogs and cats are sensitive to human social signals such as pointing, gazing and facial expressions. Previous studies have demonstrated that dogs show over-reliance on human actions in the presence of conflicting physical cues. However, it is still unclear whether this tendency is specific to dogs, or shared with other domesticated animals. Here, we compared the behavior of dogs and cats in a two-choice task after they saw a person taking and pretending to eat food from a baited container. After one experimenter showed the dogs (Experiment 1) or cats (Experiment 2) two opaque containers, each containing a piece of the food, another (the demonstrator) removed food from one container and ate it (Eating condition), or simply picked up the food and returned it to the container (Showing condition). We recorded which container the subjects approached first after the demonstration. Both dogs and cats were less likely to choose the container associated with the human in the Eating than the Showing condition, although choice for this container was above chance in both conditions. In Experiment 3, we confirmed that dogs and cats naturally chose a baited over an empty container. These results suggest that both species' reasoning abilities might be influenced by a bias for prioritizing specific human actions. Although dogs and cats have different domestication histories, their social awareness of humans appears similar, possibly because they both share their environment with humans.

We examined whether cats have a cross-modal representation of humans, using a cross-modal expectancy violation paradigm originally used with dogs by Adachi et al. (Anim Cogn 10:17-21, 2007). We compared cats living in houses and in cat cafés to assess the potential effect of postnatal experience. Cats were presented with the face of either their owner or a stranger on a laptop monitor after playing back the voice of one of two people calling the subject's name. In half of the trials the voice and face were of the same person (congruent condition) whereas in the other half of trials the stimuli did not match (incongruent condition). The café cats paid attention to the monitor longer in incongruent than congruent conditions, showing an expectancy violation. By contrast, house cats showed no similar tendency. These results show that at least café cats can predict their owner's face upon hearing the owner's voice, suggesting possession of cross-modal representation of at least one human. There may be a minimal kind or amount of postnatal experiences that lead to formation of a cross-modal representation of a specific person.

We used an expectancy violation procedure to ask whether cats could use a causal rule to infer the presence of an unseen object on hearing the noise it made inside a container and predict its appearance when the container was turned over. We presented cats with either an object dropping out of an opaque container or no object dropping out (turning-over phase) after producing either a rattling sound by shaking the container with the object inside, or no sound (shaking phase). The cats were then allowed to freely explore the experimental environment (exploration phase). The relation between the sound and the object matched with physical laws in half of the trials (congruent condition) and mismatched in the other half (incongruent condition). Inferring the presence of an unseen object from the noise was predicted to result in longer looking time in the incongruent condition. The prediction was supported by the cats' behavior during the turning-over phase. The results suggest that cats used a causal-logical understanding of auditory stimuli to predict the appearance of invisible objects. The ecology of cats' natural hunting style may favor the ability for inference on the basis of sounds.