They also discriminate between familiar and unfamiliar humans and distinguish the voices of their owners from strangers. Moreover, they exhibit referential looking toward their owner in order to receive information about a novel and potentially frightening object. Cats successfully use human pointing gestures to locate hidden food and follow the human gaze for referential information. During domestication, they became sensitive to human communicative signals and developed human-compatible social skills that enable them to communicate with humans.
Having shared the same living environment with humans for at least 10,000 years, cats entertain complex and long-lasting relationships with their owners that have been recently classified as attachment bonds, as previously described for the human-dog relationship. The scientific interest shown towards dogs in the last decades, indeed, has been considerably higher compared to cats. Cats, along with dogs, are the most popular pets, yet their socio-cognitive abilities remain poorly investigated and understood. Therefore, further studies are needed to shed light on cats’ ability to integrate sensory information to recognize conspecifics and unknown humans. In addition, cats’ lifetime experience with humans seems to affect their ability to cross-modally recognize them. Cats, indeed, can predict the owners’ face upon hearing their voices. However, contrary to the above-mentioned species, this ability appears to be limited to the owners and it is not extended to unfamiliar people. A recent study has provided evidence about cats’ cross-modal ability to recognize humans by matching individual voices and faces. Interestingly, species living in close contact with humans are also capable of integrating visual and auditory cues to identify a familiar human, as recently demonstrated in horses, rhesus monkeys, and dogs, which also generalize this ability to unfamiliar people. Cross-modal recognition has been recently found in goats, horses, dogs, crows, and non-human primates for conspecific identification. It allows an accurate and reliable recognition of other individuals, since inputs from a single sensory domain are combined with the stored information previously acquired from other sensory modalities in order to activate a cognitive representation in the animal’s favored modality. This high-level cognitive ability demonstrates that animals form a multimodal internal representation of individuals that is independent of the sensory modality. Animals not only identify conspecifics and humans through separate sensory modalities (e.g., cats: dogs: goats: sheep: cattle: and cheetahs: ) but they are also capable of integrating identity cues from multiple sensory modalities to recognize them (dogs: horses: goats: rhesus monkeys: crows:, and cats: ). Moreover, a growing body of literature has demonstrated that domestic species recognize human faces (dogs: sheep: horses: ) and voices (cats: horses: pig: and dogs: ). Several species of domestic mammals are also able to discriminate between familiar and unfamiliar humans (cats: pigs: cattle: and horses: ) and form a memory of specific persons that influence their reactions in subsequent interactions (pigs: and horses: ).
Recent studies have reported that some animals have an efficient visual (cattle: sheep: horses: and dogs: ) and auditory recognition of their conspecifics (cats: dogs: cattle: pig: and horses: ). Faces and voices convey information about individual identity and represent the most relevant cues used by human and several non-human species for individual recognition. The recognition of individuals is central in social species. The understanding of cats’ socio-cognitive abilities to perceive their close partners’ emotions is crucial for improving the quality of human-cat and cat-cat relationships as well as cat welfare in the domestic environment. Our results demonstrate that cats integrate visual and auditory signals to recognize human and conspecific emotions and they appear to modulate their behavior according to the valence of the emotion perceived. In the light of this, the aim of the present work was to investigate cats’ ability to recognize conspecific and human emotions. Although previous studies have demonstrated that cats are sensitive to conspecific and human communicative signals, their perception of these species’ emotions hasn’t been extensively investigated. Cats entertain social relationships with individuals of the same species (conspecifics) as well as with humans (heterospecifics). The ability to perceive other individuals’ emotions plays a central role for animals living in social groups.
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