Cats Like To Sit In Squares — Even Ones That Are Really Optical Illusions

By Emma Young The world is not exactly short of videos of cute cats up to strange antics. But one particular set of videos collected by cat owners during a COVID-19 lockdown reveals something genuinely interesting: a famous optical illusion that fools us also gets cats. The citizen science project, in which cats were experimented on in their own homes, shows that they, too, are tricked by “Kanizsa squares”, an illusion that suggests the presence of a square that doesn’t in fact exist. It’s well known that cats love to sit in enclosed spaces, like boxes. They even like to sit in square shapes made of tape, as documented during a 2017 Twitter craze (#CatSquare). So in the new study, published in Applied Animal Behaviour Science, Gabriella E. Smith at City University of New York and colleagues took this further, to see if cats also show a preference for illusory squares. Of the 500 pet cats and owners who signed up to take part, 30 completed all the trials. The owners “were not aware of the study’s investigative purpose at any point before or during the experiment”, the authors write. (Well, they weren’t told what it was about, at least.) Every day for six days, each owner put their cat out of the room while they taped a pair of stimuli to the floor. The researchers instructed them each day on which two of three stimuli to use: an actual square, a Kanizsa square (in which four Pacman-type cut-outs are arranged to suggest the lines of a sq...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Cognition Comparative Illusions Source Type: blogs