Cat intelligence is the capacity of the domesticated cat to solve problems, and adapt to its environment. Researchers have also shown feline intelligence to include the ability to acquire new behavior that applies previously learned knowledge to new situations, communicating needs and desires within a social group, and responding to training cues.
Video Cat intelligence
Brain
Brain size
The brain of the domesticated cat is about 5 centimetres (2.0 inches) long, and weighs 25-30 g (0.88-1.06 oz). If a typical cat is taken to be 60 cm (24 in) long with a weight of 3.3 kg (7.3 lb), then the brain would be at 0.91% of its total body mass, compared to 2.33% of total body mass in the average human. Within the encephalization quotient proposed by Jerison in 1973, values above 1 are classified big brained, while values lower than 1 are small brained. The domestic cat is attributed a value of between 1-1.71 relative to human value that is 7.44-7.8. The largest brains in the cat kingdom are those of the tigers in Java and Bali, of which the largest relative brain size within the pantera is the tigris. It is debated whether there exists a causal relationship between brain size and intelligence in vertebrates. Correlations have been shown between these factors in a number of experiments. However, correlation does not imply causation. Most experiments involving the relevance of brain size to intelligence hinge on the assumption that complex behavior requires a complex (and therefore intelligent) brain; however, this connection has not been consistently demonstrated.
The surface area of a cat's cerebral cortex is approximately 83 cm2 (13 in2) whereas the human brain has a surface area of about 2,500 cm2 (390 in2). Furthermore, a theoretical cat weighing 2.5 kg (5.5 lb) has a cerebellum weighing 5.3 g (0.19 oz), 0.17% of the total weight.
Brain structures
According to researchers at Tufts University School of Veterinary Medicine, the physical structure of the brains of humans and cats is very similar. The human brain and the cat brain both have cerebral cortices with similar lobes.
The number of cortical neurons contained in the brain of the cat is reported to be 253 million. Area 17 of the visual cortex was found to contain about 51,400 neurons per mm3. Area 17 is the primary visual cortex.
Both human and feline brains are gyrencephalic, i.e. they have a surface folding.
Analyses of cat brains have shown they are divided into many areas with specialized tasks that are extremely interconnected and share sensory information in a kind of hub-and-spoke network, with a large number of specialized hubs and many alternate paths between them. This exchange of sensory information allows the brain to construct a complex perception of the real world and to react to and manipulate its environment.
The thalamus of the cat constituting a hypothalamus, epithalamus, ventral and dorsal parts and have flexibility of cerebral encoding from visual information, adaptability corresponding to changing environmental stimuli.
Secondary brain structures
The domestic cat brain also contains the hippocampus, amygdala, frontal lobes (which comprise 3 to 3.5% of the total brain in cats compared to about 25% in humans), corpus callosum, anterior commissure, pineal gland, caudate nucleus, septal nuclei and midbrain.
Brain and diet
A cognitive support diet for felines is a food that is formulated to improve mental processes like attention, short and long-term memory, learning, and problem solving. Claims for cognitive support appear on a number of kitten formulations to help with brain development, as well as diets aimed at seniors to help prevent cognitive disorders. These diets typically focus on supplying Omega-3 fatty acids, omega-6 fatty acids, taurine, vitamins, and other supporting supplements that have positive effects on cognition.
The omega-3 fatty acids are a key nutrient in cognition for felines. They are essential for felines as they cannot be synthesized naturally and must be obtained from the diet. Omega-3 fatty acids that support brain development and function are alpha-linolenic acid, docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) and eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA). Fish oils, fish and other marine sources provide a very rich source of DHA and EPA. Alpha-linolenic acid can be acquired from oils and seeds.
Omega-6 fatty acids are also needed in feline cognition diets. The important omega-6 fatty acid that plays a role in brain support and cognition is arachidonic acid. Arachidonic acid or AA is found in animal sources such as meat and eggs. AA is required in cat diets, as felines convert insignificant amounts of it from linoleic acid due to the limited delta-6 desaturase. Like DHA, arachidonic acid is often found in the brain tissues of cats and seems to have a supporting role in brain function. In a 2000 study completed by Contreras et al., it was found that DHA and AA made up 20% of the fatty acids in the mammalian brain. Arachidonic acid makes up high amounts in the membrane of most cells and has many pro-inflammatory actions.
Taurine is an amino acid, which is essential in cat diets due to their low capacity to synthesize it. Because of taurine has the ability to cross the blood-brain barrier in the brain, it has been found to have a role in many neurological functions, especially in the visual development. Without taurine, felines can have an abnormal morphology in the cerebellum and visual cortex. When cats were fed a diet deficient in taurine, this leads to a decrease in the concentration of taurine in the retina of the eye. This results in deterioration of the photoreceptors, followed by complete blindness.
Choline is a water-soluble nutrient that prevents and improves epilepsy and cognitive disorders. Supplementation is part of therapy for cats with seizures and Feline cognitive dysfunction, despite this treatment being mostly based on anecdotal evidence and research done on dogs. It is the precursor to nerve chemicals like dopamine and acetylcholine, making it important for proper functioning of the nervous system.
Maps Cat intelligence
Memory
Taken as a whole, cats have excellent memories. However, relationships with humans, individual differences in intelligence, and age may all affect memory. Cats easily adapt to their current environment because they can adapt their memories of past environments throughout their lives.
Kittens
For kittens, play is more than fun, but for ranking social order, building hunting skills, and generally exercising for their adult roles. Before cats were domesticated, kittens learned survival skills, such as where to find food, from observing their mothers. The first two to seven weeks are a critical time when kittens bond with other cats. It has been suspected that without any human contact during this time, the cat would forever mistrust humans.
Older cats
Just as in humans, advancing age may affect memory in cats. Some cats may experience a weakening of both learning ability and memory that affects them adversely in ways similar to those occurring in poorly aging humans. A slowing of function is normal, and this includes memory. Aging may affect memory by changing the way their brain stores information and by making it harder to recall stored information. Cats lose brain cells as they age, just as humans do. The older the cat, the more these changes can affect its memory. There have been no studies done on the memories of aging cats, but there is some speculation that, just like people, short-term memory is more affected by aging. In one test of where to find food, cats' short-term memory lasted about 16 hours.
Diseases
Disease, such as feline cognitive dysfunction (FCD) - a condition similar to Alzheimer's disease in humans - could also affect cat memory. Symptoms of FCD include disorientation, reduced social interaction, sleep disturbances, and loss of house training. FCD causes degenerative changes in the brain that are the source of the functional impairment.
Central retinal degeneration
Central retinal deficiency is a cognitive dysfunction in cats that primarily caused by a nutritional deficiency but can be hereditary as well.However, because of improved nutritional health in recent years, the incidence of hereditary cases of this disease are seen less frequently.
The retina, a thin layer of tissue in the back of the eye, is the structure affected by this disorder. This structure receives the light gathered and focused from the lens. It essentially take light and converts it into electrical nerve signals that the brain interprets as vision. The retina contains rods and cones which are photo-receptors that help the animal see (rods) and see certain colours (cones).
Retinal degeneration can be caused by a taurine deficiency, which is why many cat foods are supplemented with taurine. Central retinal deficiency is irreversible but its effects can be significantly hindered if you provide a diet supplemented with adequate amounts of taurine. Vitamin deficiencies in A and E can also lead to retinal degeneration in cats.
Domestication effect
Cat intelligence study is mostly from consideration of the domesticated cat. The process of domestication has allowed for closer observation of cat behaviour and in the increased incidence of interspecies communication, and the inherent plasticity of the cat's brain has become apparent as the number of studies in this have increased scientific insight. Changes in the genetic structure of a number of cats have been identified as a consequence of both domestication practises and the activity of breeding, so that the species has undergone genetic evolutionary change due to human selection. The domesticated cat developed by artificial selection to possess characteristics desirable for the sharing of human habitation and living, coupled with an initial naturally occurring selective set of cat-choices made while interacting with Neolithic urban environments.
Cats' intelligence may have increased during their semi-domestication: urban living may have provided an enriched and stimulating environment requiring novel adaptive behaviours. This scavenging behaviour would only have produced slow changes in evolutionary terms. Such changes are comparable to the changes to the brain of early primitive hominids who co-existed with primitive cats, like Machairodontinae, Megantereon and Homotherium, and adapted to savannah conditions.
Considering the fossil-based family tree of placental mammals above; the feline line diverged many years previously from the primate line; the cat both feral and domesticated is likely to be maintained in a stasis by its niche position in the current food web.
Learning capacity
The cats in the key experiments conducted by Edward Thorndike were able to learn through operant conditioning. In Thorndike's experiment, cats were placed in various boxes approximately 20 inches long, 15 inches wide, and 12 inches tall with a door opened by pulling a weight attached to it. The cats were observed to free themselves from the boxes by "trial and error with accidental success." In one test the cat was shown to have done worse in a later trial than in an earlier one, suggesting that no learning from the previous trials was retained in long-term memory. The scientist considered the cat to have the capacity for learning due to the law of effect, which states that responses followed by satisfaction (i.e. a reward) become more likely responses to the same stimulus in the future.
An experiment was conducted in 2009 where cats could pull on a string to retrieve a treat under a plastic screen. When presented with one string, cats had no trouble getting the treats. When presented with multiple strings, some of which were not connected to treats, the cats were unable to consistently choose the correct strings, leading to the conclusion that cats do not understand cause and effect in the same way that humans do. Thorndike was skeptical of the presence of intelligence in cats, criticising sources of the contemporary writing of the sentience of animals as "partiality in deductions from facts and more especially in the choice of facts for investigation."
Research was made to identify possible observational learning in kittens. Kittens that were able to observe their mothers performing an experimentally organised act were able to perform the same act sooner than kittens that had observed a non-related adult cat, and sooner than the ones who, being placed in trial and error conditions, observed no other cat performing the act. Experimental investigation of primates has shown chimpanzee possess some limited insight with regard to observational learning (see Köhler), whereas this capacity is wholly absent in the domesticated cat, P. leo, and P. tigris.
The effect of training
Cats are known to be trained to perform as circus animals. An example of this is The Yuri Kuklachev Cat Theatre based in Moscow, the owner of which has been training cats for many years to perform a range of circus-style tricks.
Intelligence
Intelligence through behavioural observation is defined as a composite of skills and abilities. The WAIS test is a measure of intelligence in adult homo sapiens. The test scores on four criteria; verbal comprehension, perceptual organization, working memory and processing speed. In a comparative evaluation from WAIS criteria, cats are generally fair in intelligence. The working memory for object permanence of the domesticated cat is surmised from experiment as being 16 hours.
Factors that contribute to greater intelligence are the velocity at which electrical transmission is conducted and with the number of cortical neurons. Compared to mammalian species this number was eleven-fourteenth in total.
In controlled experiments, cats showed that they had fully developed concepts of object permanence, meaning that sensorimotor intelligence is completely developed in cats. For human infants, tests involving multiple invisible displacement of an object are used to assess the beginning of mental representation in the sixth and last stage of sensorimotor intelligence. The cats' searches on these tasks were consistent with representation of an unsensed object and fully developed sensorimotor intelligence. In experimental conditions, the memory of a cat was demonstrated as having an information-retention or recall, of a duration totalling as much as 10 years.
Cats have complex dreams while sleeping, retaining and recalling long sequences of events while they are asleep, as many other animals do. A dreaming cat will usually have rapid, uncontrolled facial, whisker, paw, and abdominal movements. Occasionally cats have violent nightmares with muffled screams and may suddenly wake up screaming from the nightmare.
Artificial intelligence
Since 2006, when the entire DNA constituents in sequence of the Abyssinian cat were made into a genetic map of the Felis catus, genetically engineering some form of enhanced cat intelligence has become theoretically possible. Artificially enhanced cat intelligence would therefore only become a consideration for use in experiment, perhaps at some unknown time in future. The production of more intelligent cats might be theoretically a consideration for military organisations i.e. DARPA, in the hope of gleaning some advancement in warfare. Practically the common cat has proved little use for military personnel (Acoustic Kitty), despite the potential inherent in a creature with far greater prowess and agility than any human.
In November 2009, scientists claimed to simulate a cat's brain using a supercomputer containing 24,576 processors. This experiment did not simulate the function of the individual neurons in the brain, nor their synaptic patterns. It was intended to demonstrate that the problem of simulating a biological brain could be scaled to very large supercomputer platforms. However, the approach has been criticised as flawed.
There are a number of reasons the cat brain is a goal of computer simulations. Cats are familiar and easily kept animals, so the physiology of cats has been particularly well studied. The physical structures of human brains and cat brains are very similar. Cats, like humans, have binocular vision that gives them depth perception. Building artificial mammal brains requires ever more powerful computers as the brain gets more complex, from the mouse brain, to the rat brain (in 2007), to the cat brain, and ultimately to the human brain. Building artificial mammal brains advances the research of both neuroscience and artificial intelligence, but also leads to questions of the definition of sentient and conscious life forms, and to the ethics of artificial consciousness and the ethics of artificial intelligence.
See also
- Dog intelligence
References
Further reading
- Bergler, Reinhold "Man and Cat: The Benefits of Cat Ownership" Blackwell Scientific Publications (1989)
- Bradshaw, John W S "The Behaviour of the Domestic Cat" C A B International (1992)
- Chesler, P. (1969). "Maternal Influence in Learning by Observation in Kittens". Science. 166 (3907): 901-3. Bibcode:1969Sci...166..901C. doi:10.1126/science.166.3907.901. PMID 5345208.
- Hobhouse, L T Mind in Evolution MacMillan, London (1915)
- Turner, Dennis C, and Patrick Bateson. "The Domestic Cat: The Biology of Its Behaviour" Cambridge University Press (1988)
- Miles, R. C. (1958). "Learning in kittens with manipulatory, exploratory, and food incentives". Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology. 51 (1): 39-42. doi:10.1037/h0049255. PMID 13513843.
- Neville, Peter "Claws and Purrs" Sidgwick & Jackson (1992)
- Neville, Peter "Do Cats Need Shrinks" Sidgwick & Jackson (1990)
- Voith, VL (1981). "You, too, can teach a cat tricks (examples of shaping, second-order reinforcement, and constraints on learning)". Modern Veterinary Practice. 62 (8): 639-42. PMID 7290076.
External links
- D.M.Fankhauser biology.clc.uc.edu Removal and study of the cat brain and Cranial nerves of the cat biology.clc.uc.edu [Retrieved 2011-12-22] (images and instruction) for an anatomy and physiology class for the dissecting of the brain of a cat
Source of article : Wikipedia
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