Groundbreaking Cat Science Shows They Love to Sit in Illusory Boxes, Too
upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:
Groundbreaking Cat Science Shows They Love to Sit in Illusory Boxes, Too:
In a delightful citizen science study performed during the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers used cats' urge to sit in enclosed spaces to test how their little minds perceive a visual illusion. The study was affectionately labelled... wait for it... "If I fits, I sits".
The illusion at hand was the Kanizsa square: four pacman-like shapes orientated to look like they're forming four corners of a square, inducing the viewer to perceive a square that isn't actually there.
Such illusions happen when our brains fit visual information around preconceptions, likely to fill in missing information. They're quite handy for picking out predatory or food shapes obscured by foliage.
Cognitive ethologist Gabriella Smith from the City University of New York and colleagues recruited humans to set up floor objects for their feline lordlings to choose from - a taped square, a visual illusion of a square, and the same components as the visual illusion, but not arranged to produce a square (the control).
The cat owners were required to film the cats' response under reasonably controlled conditions to avoid influencing the animals' choices (this involved wearing sunglasses, too). While over 500 pet cats were originally enrolled, the final data set shrunk down to 30 citizen scientists who managed to complete all the necessary trials.
Journal Reference:
Nicolette Becker, Sasha Prasad-Shreckengast, Sarah-Elizabeth Byosiere. Methodological Challenges in the Assessment of Dogs' (Canis lupus familiaris) Susceptibility of the Ebbinghaus-Titchener Illusion Using the Spontaneous Choice Task, (DOI: 10.26451/abc.08.02.04.2021)
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