How Intelligent Are Cats?
Copyright 2004-2014, Sarah Hartwell
Cat owners often claim that cats are too intelligent to do the sort of tricks that dogs do willingly. Others believe cats are unintelligent because it’s harder to train them to do tricks. In this article (on 2 pages) I aim to explain some of these differences and explore feline intelligence and the limitations on feline intelligence. This also means looking at how cats see the world and at some aspects of natural cat behaviour.
Unfortunately for cats, they are often non-consenting participants in surgically intrusive experiments to assess learning and intelligence. Humans seem to feel it necessary to assess the intelligence of animals as a way of reinforcing our own sense of superiority and the cat has been a favourite subject for studying learning and brain function for over a century. Many tests insert electrodes into cats’ brains either to monitor brain activity or stimulate certain behaviour; others involve deliberately injuring the brain to see whether learning capacity or intelligence is affected. Most such test subjects are killed and their brains further dissected to look for evidence of brain changes resulting from learning. I personally consider these experiments cruel and gratuitous (their medical benefit to humans is too often dubious) and though some such experiments are referenced here, Messybeast.com does not support this form of experimentation.
In recent years there has been an increase in tests in a more natural home-type environment rather than an artificial laboratory environment. While lab conditions are more easily manipulated, they do not bring out the best in test subjects and give misleading results. Better tests also take into account an animal’s innate behaviours and instincts, things which have previously counted against cats in classical laboratory tests. This article also considers some of the anecdotal evidence for intelligence reported by owners, but frequently dismissed by laboratory researchers. Since cats operate in the natural world, it makes sense to observe them in their own environment and not just in highly controlled, artificial laboratory environments.
Dogs have been trained to guard/protect, herd, hunt, search/rescue, assist (e.g. guide dogs for the blind) and perform circus tricks, obedience or agility classes. To many, this is a clear sign of their intelligence and the superiority of the canine intellect over feline intelligence. Cats have been trained to perform tricks as seen on films or TV advertisements, but do not have the same repertoire as dogs. This leads to the obvious conclusions that cats are neither intelligent enough nor co-operative enough to be trained.
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.
Most of the canine activities cited earlier rely upon manipulating canine social instincts. Dogs live, hunt and play in hierarchical social packs headed by an alpha male and alpha female. They frequently co-operate in raising/guarding the alpha pair’s young and co-operate to hunt large prey. Juveniles beg submissively for food from adults. They are eager to please/appease pack-mates in order to remain part of their pack and they demonstrate submissiveness to higher ranking animals. Domestic dogs view humans as dominant pack members so they are eager to please us. In addition, dogs have been selectively bred over hundreds of years to enhance some traits and reduce or eliminate others.
Cats, meanwhile, have a different social structure. Where food is plentiful they are largely solitary although females, usually related ones, may form social groups. Males tend to roam in search of females rather than remain as part of a group. Where food sources are localised (e.g. a rubbish dump) they form colonies but the social structure is more akin to that of lions – groups of females who may co-operatively raise young. Unlike lions, cats do not generally hunt prey larger than themselves and rarely hunt in pairs or groups. Cats are, therefore, independent rather than truly social and have little or no need to co-operate with other cats. Feline co-operation with humans is limited unless it serves the individual cat’s interests to perform a task. Whereas dogs have been bred for utility, cats have been bred solely for appearance.
Dogs are largely motivated by the pack-living instinct i.e. they will perform purely for praise and acceptance dished out by the dominant pack member (i.e. the owner or trainer). They will also perform because, in the wild, they risk being driven out of a pack or being demoted to pariah position.
Cats are not motivated by social status factors. To train a cat you must find out what motivates it. Usually this means food, or at least conditioning it that there is the promise of food at the end of the session. Even then, cats are not motivated by food in the same way as dogs – if achieving the food reward is too much hard work, cats frequently cut their losses and go in search of easier “prey”. In the wild, it makes no sense for a solo hunter to expend more energy on finding or killing prey than it gets from eating that prey. While dogs will track and pursue prey over long distances and wear down their quarry, cats hunt by waiting in ambush and pursuing prey for short distances only. Starving a cat does not make it easier to train either, cats are better than dogs at ignoring hunger pangs. For young cats, although food is a powerful reward, activities such as manipulation of simple objects such as a ball or scrunched up paper, or the chance to explore an unfamiliar space can be adequate rewards in some tasks. There will always be some cats who not only learn easily, but appear to relish learning, though these are the exception rather than the rule.
Because we judge intelligence by comparing other creatures to ourselves, many popular accounts of cat behaviour describe learning as though cats are mentally defective humans rather than highly specialised carnivores. For example, in 1915 L T Hobhouse (Professor of Sociology at the University of London) wrote:
“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.”
Hobhouse interpreted his cat’s behaviour as having purposeful elements though he offers an alternative “behaviourist” explanation: an association between the motivation and “pleasure” of getting through the door, and the action of lifting and dropping the mat.
Early Stimulus-Response Theories
Early psychologists believed all behaviour resulted from stimulus-response associations. Their theories had no room for thinking, consciousness, instinct, innate behaviours or a predisposition to certain behaviours. At its simplest level, learning involves linking together (“associating”) previously unrelated stimuli, or actions and the consequences of those actions. Many invertebrate animals are capable of forming such associations. Early researchers had discovered hard-wired behaviours, but extrapolated that all behaviours were simple stimulus-response reflexes. In 1966, Fernand Mery wrote:
“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.”
In the past, psychologists believed all learning to be simple association. The stimulus-response reflex-action theory was also considered true for humans. It is now thought that many mammals are capable of more complex mental processes. Most higher animals have some sort of mental representation of their world, and how the world works, which they consult whenever they have to make a decision. It may never be possible to truly understand how a cat perceives and understands the world. Virtual reality can give us an idea of what the world looks and sounds like to a cat by adjusting the signals which reach our eyes and ears and by filming from cat’s-eye level, but however much scientists poke electrodes into the brains of unfortunate felines, they cannot truly get inside their minds. To investigate feline intelligence and learning abilities, we must devise better suited, and more humane, tests. To do that, we must understand how cats have evolved to suit their environment and lifestyle, things that which predispose them to behave in certain ways.
One of the simplest forms of learning is Pavlovian conditioning (Pavlovian Learning). This involves associating a stimulus with an event. One stimulus, called the Unconditioned Stimulus, is normally linked to a particular motivational state and results in an innate reaction called the Unconditioned Response. For example, if the Unconditioned Stimulus is the smell of food and the motivational state is “hunger”, then the UCR is drooling! If a Conditioned Stimulus such as a buzzer, occurs just before, or at the same time as, the Unconditioned Stimulus then it results in the Unconditioned Response even on its own. The Unconditioned Response becomes a Conditioned Response and the conditioned subjects drool at the sound of the buzzer.
In a cat’s natural environment, an Unconditioned Stimulus might be the pain inflicted by an aggressive tom cat. The Unconditioned Response will probably be flight to avoid a repetition of the pain. In the future, the mere sight of the aggressor (now a Conditioned Stimulus) might result in flight i.e. a Conditioned Response because the cat is motivated to “avoid pain”. If the Conditioned Stimulus (the aggressive tom cat) is in the distance the cat is motivated to “avoid detection” and the Conditioned Response is to freeze instead of flee. Pavlovian conditioning forms a link between the original stimulus and the conditioned stimulus, but the actual response depends on the cat’s motivational state.
Conditioned learning is complicated by an animal’s innate behaviours. Cats’ ears are designed to home in on noises like small rustling prey in long grass. In an experiment, arrival of food was signalled by 10 seconds of a clicking sound from a loudspeaker 2 metres away from the food dispenser. The cats ran towards the sound, searched around the loudspeaker or even attacked it. Some ignored the actual food and concentrated their attentions on the loudspeaker. It took hundreds of trials to condition the cats to go to the food dispenser when they heard the clicks. In the same experiment, rats did not investigate the loudspeaker, but quickly associated the sound with the arrival of food. This was not because the cats were stupid. To cats, sound indicates the apparent location of “prey” and they reacted according to their instincts. Highly adapted predators expect to find the prey noises and the prey itself (the food) at the same location. Cats quickly learn when a Conditioned Stimulus is unreliable and they can “un-learn” an unreliable Conditioned Response, ignoring bells, buzzers, clicks or whatever as irrelevant.
Humans are biased in assessing the intelligence of other species, judging them according to their similarity to ourselves. Animals having good eyesight and dextrous hands are consistently rated as more intelligent than animals lacking those features. We are biased towards animals that see, react to and manipulate things in a similar way to ourselves. Animals that learn to do things useful to humans are also rated as more intelligent than less co-operative creatures. This is a shortfall in human worldview, not in animal intelligence.
Animals that rely largely on instinct or highly context-specific learning (i.e. only learns things related to the environment it evolved to live in) can only readapt at a pace determined by evolutionary mechanisms. Those with more extensive learning abilities can alter their behaviour patterns rapidly. Cats also have “ecologically surplus ability” i.e. the capacity to solve problems outside of its specific adaptations to its environmental niche. Ecologically surplus abilities allow animals to cope with rapid or unexpected change in the environment, but are hard to measure. The cat’s ecologically surplus abilities are demonstrated by its ability to move from pampered pet to feral feline and back again, within a very few generations, or even within the lifetime of a single cat.
Humans often define intelligence as IQ. This is misleading because there are different scoring systems for IQ and it is possible to learn how to perform well at IQ tests. There are also intelligent people who don’t perform well at IQ tests because the tests are biased to certain types of intelligence (e.g. logical reasoning) and are culturally skewed. Other tests include the ability to learn and remember. Is the ability to learn by rote a sign of intelligence? If so, any avian mimic is intelligent. Intelligence comprises many things – the ability to understand and utilise one’s environment; the ability learn and remember facts (store knowledge); the ability to link facts; the ability to apply knowledge and to adapt it to new situations; the ability to override or adapt an instinctive response.
A cat or dog does not need to learn nuclear physics or understand Shakespeare in order to survive. Animal intelligence is linked to the animal’s natural environment and its survival needs. To measure its intelligence we must adapt our perception of intelligence to its world-view and formulate tests appropriately. If the test relies on learning, we must find out what motivates a dog or a cat to learn or to perform Different animals’ ecology means different motivating factors We need tests which apply to the animal’s physical and behavioural traits and constraints, not to our own constraints. We also need some way to compare their very different behaviours.
Different animals have different innate behaviours. For example, an untrained cat and an untrained Border Collie dog are both presented with a group of ducklings. The dog herds the ducklings and protects them. The cat stalks the ducklings and eats one or more of them. Is the cat unintelligent because it doesn’t herd the ducklings? Is the dog unintelligent because it fails to identify those ducklings as prey and it doesn’t take advantage of a meal opportunity?
