Intelligence in Cats

This article, How Intelligent Are Cats, covers a whole range of topics:

• The Truth About Cats and Dogs
• Early Stimulus-Response Theories
• What is Intelligence Anyway?
• Horses for Courses - and Tests for Species
• How Cats See the World
• Early Learning and Slowing Seniors
• Self-Centred Mental Maps
• The Feline Time-Space Continuum
• Easily Demotivated
• Complex Learning and Making Decisions
• Trial and Error and Learning Through Observation
• Counting Cats
• Can Cats Learn Tricks?
• Cats Using Tools?
• Thinking, Consciousness and Self-Awareness
• References and Further Reading

The Truth About Cats and Dogs

Dogs have been taught many more tricks and practical activities than cats. But a lot of the differences may come back to a difference in motivations, and social structure, between cats and dogs:

For example, in experiments where cats and dogs were expected to navigate mazes, most cats performed badly. Dogs soon learned to navigate the maze and reach the reward. Cats sat down and washed. They investigated blind alleys. They did not complete the maze in the allocated time and were therefore judged as "failing the test" or "lackadaisical". Eager-to-please dogs learned that they got a reward for learning the. Cats are not motivated in this way. Being opportunists, investigating every blind alley made sense to the cat - after all, who knows where prey might be hiding in the real world? Sitting down and washing is a displacement activity when a cat is uncertain.

Dogs are pack animals that do things as part of the pack to remain in the pack, and they are willing to accept humans as part of their pack, which allows us to manipulate their social reactions to get them to do things that please us. But cats are more individualistic, so they aren't as motivated to please. Even the promise of food may not be sufficient motivation for a cat, since they will choose the easiest ways to get food.

"I once had a cat which learned to 'knock at the door' by lifting the mat outside and letting it fall. The common account of this proceeding would be that the cat did it in order to get in. It assumes the cat's action to be determined by its end. Is the common account wrong? Let us test it by trying explanations found on the more primitive operations of experience. First, then, can we explain the cat's action by the association of ideas? The obvious difficulty here is to find the idea or perception which sets the process going. The sight of a door or a mat was not, so far as I am aware, associated in the cat's experience with the action which it performed until it had performed it. If there were association, it must be said to work retrogressively. The cat associates the idea of getting in with that of someone coming to the door, and this again with the making of a sound to attract attention, and so forth. Such a series of associations so well adjusted means in reality a set of related elements grasped by the animal and used to determine its action. Ideas of 'persons', 'opening doors', 'attracting attention' and so forth, would have no effect unless attached to the existing circumstances. If the cat has such abstract ideas at all, she must have something more - namely, the power of applying them to present perception. The 'ideas' of calling attention and dropping the mat must somehow be brought together. Further, if the process is one of association, it is a strange coincidence that the right associates are chosen. If the cat began on a string of associations starting from the people in the room, she might as easily go on to dwell on the pleasures of getting in, of how she would coax a morsel of fish from one or a saucerful of cream from another, and to spend her time in idle reverie. But she avoids these associations, and selects those suited to her purpose. In short, we find signs on the one hand of the application of ideas, on the other of selection. Both of these features indicate a higher stage than that of sheer association."

Early Stimulus-Response Theories

Psychologists used to think that all activity was a result of stimulus response, and thinking or consciousness did not enter into the equation. Associations are a foundation of learning, and psychologists believed that even for hard wired behaviours, there is stimulus response as a basis.

"American neurophysiologists at Yale University are achieving success in a different field. Dr José Delgado installed a complete series of electrodes in the brain of a cat. The operation took place under complete anaesthesia, and when the cat woke up, he knew nothing about what had happened. Experiments did not begin until everything had healed perfectly. It is impossible not to feel for this laboratory cat, but those who were present and took part in the experiment confirm that he made no attempt to escape. He even seemed to appreciate the situation, as if appreciating the interest that was being taken in him. Not knowing anything about the surgical operation to which he had been submitted, he behaved as if he were obeying a simple friendly drill: he became a robot.

Around his neck, one might distinguish a small collar on to which is fixed a receiving set with tiny transmitters, to which are attached neat silver wires, each of which corresponds to a cerebral localisation and disappears into his fur. By this means, whether in the same room or hundreds of miles away, and by a radio-transmitted command, the cat can experience the need to drink (and he has water and milk placed at his disposal), to eat (he can choose whatever he wants), to itch (and can scratch himself as much as he wants). It is even possible, by stimulating such and such a part of the frontal lobes, to provoke in him an overwhelming affection or an aggressive antipathy and, in the very next moment, to reduce these states. The importance of this experiment is not that one can oblige the cat to perform such and such a movement, but one can simply, by passing an electric current, waken in him the desire to act in a determined direction.

At present such experiments towards a better knowledge of feline psychology are not being regularly followed up; though they have been renewed with monkeys and, for some time now, with humans. These same minute electrodes are planted in specifically chosen points which relate to the psychic disorders presented by the subjects. In this way it is possible to make tests whose results are extremely illuminating for psychiatrists. These results are at present being published by the New York Academy of Science. It goes without saying that they may provide us with some frightening perspectives on the human mind."

Now scientists are beginning to understand the importance of the mental representation of the world in higher animals, and how it can modify simple stimulus response. The mental representation they form of the world and how it works helps them to make choices that may differ from that of other animals in the same situation.

To investigate feline intelligence and learning abilities, ... we must understand how cats have evolved to suit their environment and lifestyle.

• Pavlovian learning
• unconditioned responses in cat's environment
• unique design of cat's ears to locate prey
• difficulty of training cats to get food by responding to auditory stimulus from a loudspeaker - They expect the food to be in the loudspeaker.

What is Intelligence Anyway?

• Humans judge intelligence in anthromorphic ways
• highly context specific learning
• Rapid or unexpected change can be coped with if an animal, like cats, possesses "ecologically surplus ability" i.e. the capacity to solve problems outside of its specific adaptations to its environmental niche
  • Cats use this to easily move from feral to pet and back again
• Motivations are important, and IQ tests need to consider the animal's motivational issues, as well as physical and behavioural traits and constraints
• Humans have a desire to defend their uniqueness when compared to other species

Horses for Courses - and Tests for Species

• An animals failure to respond to a test as we would want may have to do with their range of their sensory perceptions - e.g. testing humans with ultraviolet cues would probably cause them to fail.

How Cats See the World

Early Learning and Slowing Seniors

Self-Centred Mental Maps

The Feline Time-Space Continuum

Easily Demotivated

Complex Learning and Making Decisions

Trial and Error and Learning Through Observation

Counting Cats

Can Cats Learn Tricks?

Cats Using Tools?

Thinking, Consciousness and Self-Awareness

References and Further Reading