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URI Scientists have studied the behavior of cats sitting on squares (2021)
djmips wrote 11 hours 33 min ago:
My small dog likes to sit on squares but maybe that's because we have a
hardwood floor and the squares in this case are thin pieces of square
foam and they are comfortable.
But it is funny seeing the dog sitting several meters away from the
kitchen table at dinner on this little square island.
whartung wrote 16 hours 8 min ago:
I would think this would be old news.
"Cat, get off of the table."
"I'm not on the table, I'm on the placemat."
Cat logic.
plusplusungood wrote 16 hours 43 min ago:
Funny, a kid at my son's science fair did this for their project. I
don't recollect if he had a bibliography...
tim333 wrote 18 hours 17 min ago:
Seems to also apply to their 3d equivalent, boxes, and to larger cat
species. [1] My guess is the function is two fold - camouflage and
protection from cat attackers like dogs, and camouflage for pouncing on
prey - mice, bits of string etc.
URI [1]: https://www.google.co.uk/imgres?q=cats%20boxes&imgurl=https%3A...
krackers wrote 17 hours 18 min ago:
It remains an open problem whether this generalizes 4-dimensional
surfaces as well.
utensil4778 wrote 15 hours 27 min ago:
Maybe when a cat is sat still staring into the void, they're
actually perceiving a 4D box
a_e_k wrote 19 hours 40 min ago:
> Smith said that sheâs also curious how this research would
translate to non-domesticated cats like big, wild cats. âWe donât
know whether wild cats are susceptible to that illusion, because they
may not encounter corners and walls the same way,â Smith said.
Given that big cats behave with (proportionally larger) boxes much the
same way as domestic cats: [1] I am going to hypothesize that it would
translate quite well.
URI [1]: https://youtube.com/watch?v=J11uu8L8FTY
neilv wrote 19 hours 57 min ago:
> Out of 500 cats and owners, only 30 completed the entire trial,
Now test the 500 owners for toxoplasmosis, and correlate.
DrammBA wrote 18 hours 17 min ago:
what correlation would you expect to see?
Supermancho wrote 15 hours 35 min ago:
To see if it's the Toxo influencing the behavior. Toxo has known
effects already in animals.
sebastianconcpt wrote 20 hours 25 min ago:
This is only a mystery to those who can't speak catesse. They are
playing 4D chess with you and winning.
Joke aside, this has to be linked to their superb spatial cognition and
maybe their telemetry as they are natural ninjas.
groovy2shoes wrote 16 hours 43 min ago:
Cats, of course, speak Catalan.
huppeldepup wrote 20 hours 51 min ago:
Paper: [1] Edit: check out the main page:
URI [1]: https://gwern.net/doc/cat/psychology/2021-smith-2.pdf
URI [2]: https://gwern.net/
justsomehnguy wrote 19 hours 55 min ago:
Offtopic: an adaptive 1-, 2-, 3-column layout in the wild. Wild.
gwern wrote 18 hours 11 min ago:
I'm surprised you noticed! I think you may be the first I've seen.
Most people just think it's a 1 vs 2 column layout; but we didn't
find that quite satisfactory...
If you guys like cat optical illusions, they're susceptible to a
few others as well, like the rotating-snake one: [1]
URI [1]: https://gwern.net/doc/cat/psychology/index#regaiolli-et-al...
URI [2]: https://gwern.net/doc/cat/psychology/index#szenczi-et-al-2...
anfractuosity wrote 20 hours 53 min ago:
Haha, not heard of cats liking sitting on squares before. I wonder if
they prefer those to other angular shapes.
Curious if they'd move their sitting position around to sit in
projected squares too.
bena wrote 19 hours 47 min ago:
We have two cats and they exhibit this behavior even with circles
made with limbs. Like if I'm sitting at a table with my arms in front
of me, one cat in particular will see it as an invitation to plop
himself in the circle. Sometimes he doesn't wait for my arms, he'll
just stand in front of me until I either make a circle for him or I
move him. And sometimes, when I'm sleeping on my stomach and I'm
doing that figure 4 thing with my legs, I'll wake up with a cat
having a nap in the "leg circle".
noman-land wrote 20 hours 23 min ago:
It is really hilarious. Put a piece of paper on the floor? The cat
will sit on it. Draw a circle on the floor? The cat will sit in it.
whitmank wrote 21 hours 34 min ago:
This article loads fine but when I scroll down it turns into a custom
404 screen?
Anyone else?
bediger4000 wrote 22 hours 44 min ago:
Cats are susceptible to some optical illusions is what I take away.
In a larger sense, optical illusions mean we can't "trust our eyes" as
many exhort us to do. Does this mean those urging us to trust our eyes
are hucksters or trying to manipulate us?
xoa wrote 20 hours 21 min ago:
>In a larger sense, optical illusions mean we can't "trust our eyes"
as many exhort us to do.
No, that's not what it (necessarily) means. A lot of optical
illusions are specifically engineered to exploit biology or
evolutionary gaps, some of which are due to path dependency but
others which are likely very sensible in the ultra typical
non-synthetic non-adversarial environment. As the article here says:
>âMany animals are evolved to perform this sort of perception,â
said Smith. âItâs probably to do with navigating the environment.
You need to know when not to walk into a tree or off a cliff.â
Another way to think of this is "ability to perform high speed object
inference from partial information", and it makes a lot of sense this
would be pretty important. Much of the natural world is full of woods
and grass land where important objects are only seen through a 3D
overlay of grass/leaf/branch cover. The examples there might be real
but even more so are probably biological ones, like "huh I think
that's the shape of a predator hiding there". That's the sort of
thing that'd have some real evolutionary pressure. I think we
generally take for granted being able to infer what something is from
highly minimal information with great reliability normally but it's
not like it's a given.
So "trust, but verify" while also recognizing sometimes it's better
to err on the side of caution. For technologists doing human UI
design there are probably usability and safety considerations related
to some of this too, designers can make use of negative space in
useful and harmful ways. Finally it's fine to just enjoy optical
illusions and magic tricks and so on both for their cleverness and
what they reveal about ourselves without leaping to some sort of
silly "hucksters/manipulators" thing.
bckr wrote 21 hours 37 min ago:
The reason we have a word for optical illusions is because they are
outliers. They represent examples of when your optical sense needs to
be checked against other perceptions.
bediger4000 wrote 19 hours 13 min ago:
I'd buy that except that the umbrella term "optical illusion"
covers a lot of ground from simple physical things like a blind
spot, through those color inverting things, to weird ones that
involve computation, where you can't see all 16 dots, or the jagged
blocks "heal" themselves. Cats perceiving squares is clearly not
optical, but rather computational.
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