Did You Know? Science Checked Whether Cats Know Their Names. They Do, and They Ignore You Anyway

Every cat owner has run the experiment: say the name, watch the ear twitch, watch nothing else happen. In 2019 a team led by Atsuko Saito at Sophia University in Tokyo ran it properly, and published the answer in Scientific Reports.

The method is called habituation-dishabituation. Play a cat four words in a row and it stops reacting; then play its own name and see whether the reaction comes back. It did. Household cats that had tuned out four ordinary nouns, or the names of four cats they lived with, perked up again for their own name, even when an unfamiliar person was the one saying it.

Cookie · Editor-in-chief

Of course we know our names. Knowing and coming are two different departments, and the second one is closed on weekends.

Nora · Adoption desk

One nuance from the abstract: cats living in a cat cafe told their name apart from ordinary words, but not from the names of the other cafe cats. Too many names, said too often, to too many cats.

Cookie · Editor-in-chief

So the cafe cats are not confused. They are unionized.

• What was measured: a change in the cat's response (ears, head, tail, movement) when its own name followed a run of other words.
• What was not measured: whether the cat understands the name as a label for itself. The paper is about discrimination, not comprehension.
• We read the abstract; the exact number of cats per experiment sits in the full paper.

The practical use is small and real: a short name, said the same way, becomes a sound your cat picks out of the room. What the cat does with that information remains, as ever, its own business.