Talk:Cat intelligence

Cat intelligence was a Social sciences and society good articles nominee, but did not meet the good article criteria at the time. There may be suggestions below for improving the article. Once these issues have been addressed, the article can be renominated. Editors may also seek a reassessment of the decision if they believe there was a mistake.

Article milestones
Date	Process	Result
December 16, 2006	Good article nominee	Not listed

Psychology

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Archives

Archive 1

Edward Thorndike

Saying he performed key experiments in behavior sounds extremely misleading because he was a firm believer in eugenics and his ideas have received credible criticism.

He should probably be left in this article due to the influence he's had and his experiments with cats, but I don't think he deserves his own section or to be treated like an authority on the matter. 2600:6C42:67F0:8090:C07D:E4C4:DD5E:C500 (talk) 18:29, 16 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Citations for claims regarding cat dreams

Neither citation 1 nor 2 contain any mention of cats so far as I can tell, 1 being am article describing the paper cited in 2, done on rats. While it might be reasonable to conclude that these findings can be generalized to mammals or animals with REM cycles that claim does not seem to exist in either source directly, making their use in support of cat dream behaviors suspect. 71.34.146.117 (talk) 17:43, 18 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I've removed that entire paragraph. There appears to be a lot of uncited/unreliably sources claims in this article, I'll take a look tomorrow myself. Traumnovelle (talk) 08:35, 19 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

"Cats do not understand cause and effect"

Regarding this paragraph:

"In 2009, an experiment was conducted in which cats could pull on a string to retrieve a treat located beneath a plastic screen. When presented with a single string, the cats easily obtained the treat; however, when multiple strings were provided—some of which were not connected to treats—the cats were unable to consistently choose the correct string. This finding led to the conclusion that cats do not understand cause and effect in the same way that humans do."

One of the sources is broken, and the internet archive does not have any active copies of the page (all active copies are 404 - website not found). The only link to a scientific article links to an article other than the study. Why is the study itself not linked? I have read the actual study, which can be found here, however is behind a paywall.

The study certainly does not conclude that cats do not understand cause and effect, and this is really quite a strong conclusion to draw from a single study. The study only used a 10cm gap between strings, which means that it did not control for the fact that cats do not have good vision at close proximity. It is highly likely that the cats could not visually discriminate between the two thin strings. Anyone who owns a cat knows how terrible their vision is for objects in close proximity.

Furthermore, the only sentence in the study relating to cause and effect is:"It is possible to infer from the results that cats, like dogs, do not understand means–end connections as tested by a crossed-string set-up. Unlike dogs, however [sic], cats were found to be unable to choose between a baited and a non-baited string. (Emphasis added).

The author herself only states that it is possible to infer this fact, and it relates to a specific psychological terminology (means-end connections). How can we suggest that cats do not understand cause and effect, when they are able to open doors or turn on lights?

Activate switch -> light turns on. This is simple cause and effect. P -> Q. To suggest that cats do not understand cause and effect based on this study seems quite unscientific to me. Javsav (talk) 10:41, 2 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]