Comfort in the Box: Cat Edition

is that cats love a good box. We don't have to tell you this. Cat owners or just Internet users out there are probably familiar with this scenario, often summed up with the MIMI headline or caption If I fits, I sits. If the cat at all fits in the box, then it will sit in the box. Even if the cat doesn't quite fit in the box, you know, the cat will. A cat will often uh take the occasion to create a sort of muffin top of its entire body around the lip of a somewhat too small box

for it. Yeah, there's some hilarious pictures of this online. Um. Now for my own partic I can mainly speak to my cat, or well, the cat that lives in my house, Mochy. She I don't know if she's my cat. She's kind of her own self cat. And um, you're her feeder. I feed her and I clean up her poop desert and as as a thank you, she attacks my feet regularly and wakes me up between the hours of four am and six am demanding to be fit. Uh. But and she likes my wife a lot more than me.

But anyway, I'm still moch is good. I love her. Moch is a good cat. She's amusing, she's cute. And whenever we get a package in, we'll give her the chance to check out that box. So we'll put it there on the floor. Four She doesn't always sit inside it. Sometimes she'll just come out and check it out. If we put it on its side, she may walk inside it. Maybe she'll slit down, maybe she won't, Maybe she'll hang out.

It's totally up to her. I've often thought about the conflict that must go on within the mind of a cat when it is confronted with its carrier crate, you know the box that people you. When I was a kid, we would take our cat to the vet, not in a not in like one of those nice crates that has like the cage door and all that. But it was a cardboard box that had like fold up handles and breathing holes and stuff like. It was made for a cat to go in it. Yes, it was like

a cardboard box specifically manufactured for cat delivery. Okay, yeah, we never never had one of those. Uh we we have just a plastic and metal cat carrier. But yeah, that's a totally different enclosure for for a cat that is often associated with the stress of going other places, right. I mean, that's what I was thinking about though, is that, like there there there are two different things pulling in

the mind at the same time. On the one hand, you've got the learned associations like, oh that thing means the vet. That's bad. But still it's still a box. I don't know, it looks pretty good in there. I don't know. Mochi does not go for the for the

cat carrier. She she has negative associations there, but but you know, she'll she'll definitely go and she at least check out a shipping container that has come in um And also we have shelves in our home that are roughly cube shaped have cube shaped spaces in them, and some of these are filled up with books or or have like a drawer put in them. But we also have some at ground at a floor level in the house that have other things in them, like one have shoes uh and he's used as a shoe hutch, and

other has a trio of decorative statues in them. And Mochi loves darting into these spaces, um, you know, sort of plotting from within them. And of course she'll move the statues around whenever she's in there, so we frequently have to put the statues back where they go. Oh yeah, I can imagine being jealous of the inanimate objects that get their own little beholes. Yeah, or I mean, I think a huge part of this. So there are two things right. First of all, a cat, of domestic cat

is essentially both predator and prey. So they have this relationship with the world where they are that you know, they need to find hiding places so as to stalk their prey and to engage in these sort of behaviors that they've evolved to uh uh to do. Or the other side is they need to be able to hide themselves. They need to be wary of things that might be after them. And then on top of all of that, if you have an indoor cat like Mochi is an indoor cat um, they live in a confined environment that

they and they ultimately belong in a wider world. They shouldn't go out there. She should not go out there. She's not ready for it. There's too much, uh, there's too much out there to freak her out. And also that she's gonna eat birds, she's an invasive species. All of that. So she is where she is, but it kind of makes them a little stir crazy, I think, you know. So they have to make the most out

of the space they have. And so if there is a space and a shelf for a new box, they're gonna go check it out, just like you would check it out if you had not left the house in you know, five years, except maybe to a facility where I get punctured with needles. Yes, yeah, you know it. Get create. That's your universe, you know. And and and and

so you can maybe understand some of these behaviors. But then there there are other aspects of of cat fascination with with new items that that I've I've found intriguing. So this cat of ours, Mochi, also loves, and I mean loves, a new set of Lego or Ikea instructions. If these rectangular papers are introduced into the house and for any amount of time and she sees them, she will set on them. She will go up and she will she will have a seat on them. She may

sleep on them. Likewise, if they are print outs from the computer, if the boy leaves his homework out, then the cat will inevitably sleep on that the on that paperwork. We've had some very important paperwork in the house that has been left out in the cat will then decide to sleep on it. I feel like this is not

confined just two cats. It may be more prevalent in cats, but I've noticed in my dog he loves to if we put out a set of instructions on the floor, or any kind of roughly rectangular shaped flat thing on the floor, there's a real good chance he will move

on top of it. Which is weird with with animals, right, our pet animals, because for the most part, I mean, they're not supposed that they're technically not supposed to be able to go everywhere generally there are places I don't want my cat delay and walk, but if people are out of the house, yeah, she can kind of go wherever she wants. And yet it's going to be the I kea instruction manual, it's going to be the Lego

manual or some paperwork. Well, this was actually taken to another level of absurdity by something that connects to some of the articles we're going to talk about today, which was a viral hashtag on Twitter called hashtag cat squares. Did you read about this at the time, Um, I don't think I saw it at the time, but I've I've been catching up on it. Yeah, I I don't

remember being aware of this either. But essentially what it was was people were posting on Twitter photos where they would get some tape, just like you know, some painter's tape or something, and lay it down on the floor to make a square, and then their cat would come over and sit inside the square. Why strange. I mean, there's something clearly interesting going on with this behavior, and it seems I mean, with with stuff like this that's

just anecdotal observations. You always wonder if there's some amount of just coincidence. The cats just sitting somewhere, or maybe it's just sitting where you happen to be looking. You know, it's taking cues from you. But it at least seemed consistent enough that people were saying, like, yeah, cats sit down on pieces of paper or instructions or squares of other kinds, and even if you just make a square

outline out of tape, they'll come get into that. It seemed consistent enough that this is maybe a scientific phenomenon worth investigating. And so this is gonna connect to at least one piece of research that we'll talk about in today's episode. Hat tip that I first got the idea to do this episode today when I came across a piece by Jennifer will Let in Ours Technica that was covering this recent study that used crowdsourced participation to test

visual perception and sitting behavior and cats. Will come back to that specific study in a bit, but first I wanted to move backward a bit and look at the thing that we started talking about, which was the idea of cats being obsessed with getting inside boxes, not squares

on the floor, but three dimensional boxes. As to the question of why they love boxes so much, there are a lot of answers you can find out there, and I think this is something I encounter a lot when I look into a question of like why is my dog doing X? Or why does a cat do X? Basically anything within the realm of explaining the behavior of

common domestic animals. You can usually find a lot of veterinary science animal behavior experts of varying levels of legitimacy and their credentials, offering their opinion, but often nothing quite like a solid scientific consensus answer that's provable by experiment. But you can find some some good evidence that helps back up a few competing explanations that might be complementary of one another or might feed different aspects of box

occupation behaviors. Now, one very commonly cited answer is simply that cats like boxes because cats are cryptic animals. They like to hide. And this has to do with a couple of things, both with perceptions of safety and with predatory advantage. Yeah, like I said, they are both predator and prey, and therefore it behooves them to be good at hiding, to have hiding places scouted out, and to

hang out in them from time to time. Right, And so one example of a cat behavior expert talking about this that I came across was there's a guy named Steven Zawistowski of the s p c A who didn't explain or video about this for Business Insider in and I've seen that one quoted a bunch of times in other outlets, and his claims are basically that cats like to hide, and a box gives them a sense of safety and security because once they get into the box, they limit the number of angles that they can be

approached from. You know, you're basically like limiting the amount of space you need to be constantly aware of that you need to be monitoring. And this seems like a very reasonable guest to me, at least for part of the explanation. I would actually guess a similar psychological drive probably underlies a lot of human behaviors. For example, the desire to sit with your back to a wall as opposed to sitting in the middle of the room. What's

the table everybody wants at a restaurant? You you know, almost everybody prefers the booth in the back corner of the room as opposed to the table that's right in the middle of the room where you know, there's stuff going on behind your back. Yeah, it feels safer and feels like you're you're just less likely to be surprised. Even if you're not really worried about physical danger, there's

something kind of happening at an instinctual level. A part of it might even not be concerns about physical danger, but concerns about social surprise and social threats, you know, things that you would need to be aware of if they were happening, even if they're not physically threatening. Yeah, I mean, you might want to know who else is coming into the restaurant, or you know, you want to be able to see when your server is approaching that sort of thing. You just wanted a general awareness of

your surroundings. And if you've got your back to a wall, you're sort of wedged into a corner and all snug and cozy, you can basically see anybody who's going to approach you. But Zawistowski also says that boxes provide a vantage point from which cats can dash out an attack, and this connects to the other prong of what you were saying about them being both predator and prey. You know that it is good if you're a predator to have a sort of information advantage on your prey. You

want to be hidden from them. You want to be able to see them, but them not be able to see you, and a hiding place like a box is perfect for that. Now, I will say this seems potentially true as an explanation of some boxes, but not all, because I noticed that a lot of times cats seem to really enjoy squeezing into small boxes that are, for example, only open on the top, so they can't really see

anything around them. They couldn't possibly be watching something that they would you know, lunge out at because they can only see the ceiling or something like that. Am I wrong about this? Now? You you know, you definitely see this as well. Our cat likes to venture into the laundry hamper pretty regularly, and and uh, you know, I guess I should also point out that that our cat, like a lot of cats, uses a litter box that you enter from the top, so it's essentially like a hamper,

uh for of for for the litter um. But yeah, I guess in thinking about this, because certainly if the cat is at the bottom of the Andrey hamper, she's not really able to see anything anymore. But I guess one thing we always have to keep in mind with cats is that they do have extremely acute hearing. So that's true. Um, you know, they're their dependence on the visual world is not the same as human dependence on

the visual world. That's a good point. Have you ever seen Mochi spring out of the top of a box, even at something that that she couldn't immediately see? M m, not not really, but she does, you know, she will spring out of the box. I guess that's another thing to keep in mind is that cats are are are generally quite agile as well, so uh, leaving the bottom of the hamper is not the same as us emerging from the bottom of a well, you know, like we

would have to painstakingly claw our way back up. The cat can just launch itself out like a rocket and it's good to go. Yes, So, well, I would not consider this explanation. I don't know proven. I guess it seems like this is a very reasonable guess understanding the cat role in its native environment and uh, and the normal kinds of environmental pressures that would be on it

and how it would respond to them. That cats like hiding places because as you say, they're both predator and prey, they need a place that you know, limits the angles they can be approached from and to to provide a sense of security and safety for them and provides them advantage point that they could potentially use to launch a predatory attack from. So this all seems like a reasonable

gas s barring other evidence. But I did find some more evidence for the enclosure security hypothesis that was documented in another article that I was reading. So there was an article by Brian Gardner in Wired in called why do Cats Love Boxes So Much? And this pulled together some other studies. So the author here, for one thing, spoke to a researcher named Claudia Vinky of you trek To University in the Netherlands, who has published scientific research on the effects of access to a box on the

stress levels of cats in animal shelters. This research was done in conjunction, so Vinky was the lead author, but it was also done with L. M. Godein and UH W J. R. Vander Lye in Applied Animal Behavior Science in and this study points out that stress in shelter animals, including cats, is important for a number of reasons. Of course, It's just important on its own for the psychological welfare

of the cat. But stress is also an important factor contributing to the physical health of animals like cats, because higher levels of stress and animals could contribute to higher rates of infectious disease due to immuno deficiency from the cortisol response. Yeah. And I think anybody who's owned cats for any amount of time, you you grow to realize that, oh yeah, did they get stressed out? They can, They

can definitely get get ill. Um, particularly with ours like she has bladder issues, uh, and easily um compound by her not drinking enough water or being just a little bit too stressed. And then if and if that happens, then then everybody in the house is stressed. Oh yeah, I I can imagine. I feel for everybody in that scenario. Um. But anyway, so the authors here right. The aim of the present study was to determine the effect of a hiding box on stress levels of newly arrived cats in

a Dutch animal shelter. Therefore, nineteen newly arrived shelter cats were randomly divided into two groups. So the test group had ten cats and they had access to a box and then there was a control group of nine without a hiding box, and to determine the stress levels, they would do these observational or behavioral observations over a fourteen day period that we're done according to something called the

Kessler and Turner cat stress score. Now, the authors point out that there are some limitations here because you the the cats, uh stress score. Thing they're doing here is just based on how having to observe the cat and sort of count numbers of behaviors that would indicate or believed to indicate certain levels of relaxation or stress response. That you could probably get more accurate information about stress responses by physiological measurements, like you know, maybe measuring levels

of cortisol in the body or something like that. Though the problem there is that in order to do that, you would have to handle already stressed cats, which would itself, uh sort of probably increase the amount of stress that the cats are experiencing. So this is kind of a difficult thing to measure accurately. But they did their best

with this observational behavioral scoring system. And this was taking place during the cage quarantine period for incoming cats, so they have to go through a quarantine period, you know, as they're taken into the shelter, And the major findings of this research where the cats in the test group, so those were the cats with access to a hiding box, showed less stress pretty quickly within the first couple of days, with significant differences in the amount of stress between the

test group and the control group on days three and four. But eventually, over time the stress levels of the cats in the control group came down. It just took a lot longer, So by day fourteen, the cats in both groups were roughly the same in terms of stress. So it looks like what happened is access to a hiding box helped lower the stress of cats faster in a frightening novel situation, but after a couple of weeks it

was no longer making a difference on average. But this would kind of make sense if you imagine that the cats, you know, when you first get to a new shelter, that's probably the highest stress as they're like becoming accustomed to this novel situation. So they're going to have the most stress then and the most need for coping behaviors, for example hiding in a box. And the authors pointed out that even when the cats didn't have access to a box, say, the cats in the control group would

sometimes try to do hiding behaviors without a box. For example, they would try to hide behind their litter box. Yeah. I think anybody who has if you've ever gotten a new cat or or brought a cat into a new environment, this is frequently what happens. Like the cat and they spend the first few days or or even longer just hanging out in like one particular hiding spot, say in a you know, in a closet or something like that,

and the author is also uh. They cite a study by cry and Casey in the journal Animal Welfare from two thousand seven that found basically the same thing. It found that access to a hiding box decreased the amount of apparent stress behaviors in cats at a at an adoption center and did not make adoption any less likely. I think one thing they were wondering about is, okay, does if you give a cat a hiding space, will that make the cat less social and thus make it

less likely to get adopted? And they found no um. Cats that were that had access to a hiding space were no less likely to get adopted, and they seem to be less stressed. So hiding spaces for cats are are good, it seems all around. But in that Wired article by Gardener, UH, he cites an email exchange that he had with Claudiavinki, the author of that that first Dutch study UH, and she says that quote, hiding is a behavioral strategy of the species to cope with environmental

changes and stressors. So new stuff is going on, you don't know how to deal with it. It's it's freaking you out. How do you react? You go and hide and if you have a box, that's going to really help chill you out. Thank you, thank you. Now. There is an interesting other observation that Gardner dug up in this article, another line of reasoning that seems a little

bit related but actually different. So he cites the Cambridge University Press guide to the Domestic Cat, The Biology of its Behavior, that's the title, UH, and this book observes that quote cats do not appear to develop conflict resolution

strategies to the extent that more gregarious species do. So they may attempt to circumvent agonistic encounters by avoiding others or dec reasing their activity so that that's an interesting sort of twist on this right, that the the retreat to a box for a cat maybe not only a safety mechanism like fearing physical danger, but also a social behavior, a way of managing social relationships by avoiding potential conflict

with other members of the household or social group. So, you know, a dog might have certain conflict resolution behaviors. You know, it gets into a conflict or has unresolved kind of social tension with another dog or another human in the house, and and it has its own set of behaviors who knows what. You know, those might be uh, you know, licking or whatever, or a certain kind of like display of like like a kind of submissive display

or something like that. Cats, meanwhile, are more likely to if they're looking for a way to deal with unresolved social tension or something within the group, they might just retreat. They go and hide and and just practice avoidance behaviors.

And that's interesting because I think sometimes these concerns that the concerns for for safety versus the concern for avoiding social conflict, those can get kind of conflated even when humans think about their own behavior, But they're actually distinct phenomena, like when we were talking about why do you want to sit at the back of the restaurant? You can easily start thinking about that in terms of safety, which might be an element there, but there could also just

be like a social reasoning to it. Yeah, like to to apply this as we've applied similar discussions in the past to the open office working environment. Like, I think that's one of the huge flaws of that is that you know, you can say, well, it's about it's about coworkers being able to approach each other and and share ideas and all and all and so forth, but it also means, uh, if someone walks into the office, like they can see you and you have to see them, Like,

there's no like cats would hate that. Cats would be totally anti office. Of course, they would want a cubicle. And I don't know, I you know, I guess that a lot of it comes down to different work styles, different personnel, the styles. But I'm with the cats on this. Let us have our boxes. Oh me too. I mean not to be antisocial, you know, I like being able to work with my coworkers when it's useful to work together, but like, you know, when when I don't want to

be doing that. I don't want that as it just a constant sort of like interaction threat presenting at a low level all day long. Yeah, I I don't want my workspace to be like, you know, the the doggy daycare center, where it's just dogs running around in circles the whole time. You know. I like the idea that being cats, uh you know, engaging with each other when they want to, setting in laps or you know, laying in the sun when they want to, but also retreating

to boxes when that is their preference. Here's the way I think of it. I'm not against interacting with other other people. I don't think I'm antisocial, but I'd like to be able to flip a switch. I'd like to be able to flip the interaction switch on and flip it off, as opposed to having it in some ambiguous

middle space. But so, while all of this stuff that we're talking about makes sense, the idea of of cats having lower stre us when they have a space they can hide in for obvious safety reasons, but then also for maybe these uh these social interaction mediation reasons. Um, this brings me back to a question I think I sort of raised earlier. I guess this is a slightly different version of it. I can easily think of examples of cats getting into boxes that don't really fit the

hiding safety or avoidance hypotheses. Sometimes the cat is clearly not hiding at all, for example, when cats cram into boxes with low walls that function more as a kind of tray for the cat's body than walls that would offer any form of concealment. And these are some of the funniest examples of cats getting into boxes, but clearly lots of cats love to do this. Yeah, there's a there's a fun board game called Isle of Cats that's all about cats and like doing some sort of like

tetrisy things with cats. It's a beautifully designed game, and when you open the box, the interior of the top lid informs you the this is where your cat can sit while you play the game, and they encourage you, like, you know, to take photos of and share it, which is which is a really fun idea, but it's also yeah,

it's not. It's not deep enough for a cat to actually gain any kind of me perceivable at least a human shelter or you know, or you know, a space from which to to hunt their their humans feet or you know, so forth. It's it's just too shallow. It seems like it would not provide the sort of cover that they would be craving exactly. So I think this is where it comes in that there are probably different pressures that are that are complementary of one another and

driving cat box occupation behaviors. Cats probably occupy different boxes for different reasons. And when a cat occupies this tray kind of box, you know, the kind of tight squeeze box, I suspect, and this is something that's offered up in Gardeners article as well, that a lot of this probably

has to do with temperature. So I notice a claim that was cited in that Vinky study, the Dutch cat shelter study, and it was that the author's cited previous research by roy In that was getting sited in rochlets and that showed that cats prefer material that maintains the same temperature, with the quintessential example here being a towel. You put a towel on the floor, cat will probably prefer to get on the towel as opposed to the

floor itself or other materials. That are less stable in terms of temperature and uh and so I think cats and I would guess dogs to find less temperature variability in insulated materials like a towel or like the corrugated cardboard that makes up many boxes. And this is building on, of course, the fact that animals have a a natural

biological environmental constraint known as their therm neutral zone. Easy way to think about this, it's basically the range of temperatures in which you are comfortable due to your biology uh and and the reason you're comfortable within a certain range of temperatures is that your body is having to do less work to adapt you to that, you know, because you need to maintain a relatively constant internal body temperature.

And if you and if the range of external temperatures is outside of the thermonutral zone, then your body is going to need to be spending extra energy either heating or cooling itself in order to keep your internal temperature uh in the study zone that it needs to be. According to Gardener, and this was news to me, the thermo neutral zone for a domestic cat is roughly eighty six to ninety seven degrees fahrenheit and is the source there. He cites a two thousand six study by the National

Research Council. And so if you think about that, that's roughly like twenty degrees higher than the normal therm neutral zone for human beings, which is, you know, going to be somewhere in like the low seventies or something. Is but the temperature that most people most often feel very comfortable in. Yeah, I mean this, this is a huge reason why cats frequently want to sit in your lap, you know, because your lap is warm. It's it's kind of the perfect combination of the two because of the

underlying body heat. But then on top of that, you know, you generally have you know, some sort of slacks or jeans or some sort of garment going on, and that is where they want to be, especially when uh, you know, the ambient temperature is is far less than that that desired zone. Yeah, so I think about how how much you know, cats I've had in my life. You still love to sit on top of a computer. Those things get hot, but you know, they like it, or lay

in the sun. You know, the sun's pouring in through the window and it's making this little hot spot on the floor, and the cat loves to lay there. Um. I mean, it's just down to the fact that again I never really realized this before, but that in houses that are comfortable for humans, it seems like usually cats are going to be pretty cold. Yeah yeah, And and you you may find them also gravitating towards rooms that are or even just marginally hotter than the rest of

the house. Uh. So, like we have a middle room that has that has only has one window, and so it's not losing much much heat through there, and it tends to be a little warmer, and that's where the cat will be. Uh, that's where she's going to hang out. Gardener sites. That two thousand six study by the NRC which found quote most cats housing areas are around seventy two degrees fahrenheit, a good fourteen degrees colder than a

domestic cats minimum therm neutral temperature. So imagine if you were always living in a house that was fourteen degrees fahrenheit colder than the temperature that you would like it to be. It doesn't sound great, no, no, but here we go boxes to the rescue, because again, corrugated cardboard is a great insulator, and also think about confined spaces.

The insulated material and the tight space offered by especially a sort of body fitting box that sort of you know, muffintop cat tray that can help trap body heat, pushing a cat closer to its comfortable temperature range. And this actually seems like a very good explanation to me to to help cover the cases where cats are seeking out boxes that are clearly not serving any kind of hiding purpose. I suspect there's a lot to this one, but I wanted to mention one more possible hypothesis for for cat

box preferences that I came across. This one was cited in an article originally published on The Conversation republished in a number of other places by Nicholas H. Dodman, who is an American professor emeritus of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University. I was looking around. Looks like he does a lot of TV appearances as an animal behavior expert, and it also looks like he has some products he sells, some

pet type stuff, so caveat on those things. But he does point to a piece of published research that would at least tell us a little bit about the possible animal neuroendo chronology of box preferences, and the idea is this it's comfort via flank pressure on the body. Dodman writes, quote, think of it as a kind of swaddling behavior. The close contact with the boxes interior, we believe releases endorphins, nature's own morphine like substances, causing pleasure and reducing stress.

And the research that he cites in support of this is a study that he co authored with the animal behaviorist Temple Grandin, who is you might know her from. She's also written a lot about autism spectrum disorders UM. But they they found that pigs were comforted by what they call flank pressure or lateral side pressure, so gentle squeezing against the side of the body that seemed to trigger a relaxation response in these mammals, at least partially

due to a release of endorphins, according to Dodman. And this was published in Pharmacology, Biochemistry, and Behavior in nineteen eighty nine. So that's yet another possibility that it could be there is some kind of route through which having something pressing up tightly but you know, not too hard, but gently squeezing against the sides of its body causes a hormone release inside the cat's body that leads to decreased stress, a kind of a general euphoric response. Uh,

you know, it's it's the cuddling feeling. And this also seems plausible to me. It would I think it would overlap significantly with the kinds of stimuli that cats would seek out for the thermoregulatory reasons we mentioned just a minute ago. But I wonder you could maybe create an experiment to differentiate these two hypotheses by using boxes of

different temperatures or insulation potentials or something. Yeah, but anyway, I think we have ended up with a number of good, plausible reasons to understand why cats would seek out boxes, and even boxes of very different kinds. You know, some would be rooted in in hiding and safety and and predatory advantage or maybe mitigating potential potential social conflict within other members of the household or or the herd whatever you would call it of cats. So what is the

group name for cats? Well, I mean, like you have a feral colony of cats. Okay, the colony, let's call it that. But then the other things would possibly be a thermoregulation because in human houses, cats are often going to be cold and this potential thing rooted in the release of endorphins or the reduction of stress due to pressure on the side of the body. But this brings us back to a more difficult question that I really

don't have an answer to. I mean, we can try to speculate, but I don't yet have a strong uh hypothesis for why it is that cats would like the hashtag cat square thing. You know, why why do cats like the square on the floor the IKEA instructions or even just the square on the floor made of tape that are not even three dimensional, not going to press their sides, they're not insulated things, they're gonna keep their body warm, They're not going to offer any hiding potential.

I really don't know what's going on there, but it does very much interest me. I guess it's it's largely like unlike anything that they would encounter in the wild. Is one I guess one sort of thing that comes to my mind is that like a neat square that is uh that is outlined on a on an otherwise featureless floor, flat surface, like when would you when would

you ever have anything like that in the wild. Maybe it's just a it's something that they would be unprepared for, you know, and that would would sort of create a loophole or you know, cognitive error. I'm not sure. It's kind of a novelty thing like that's weird. I mean the other thing that I kind of suspect though one of the studies I'm about to look at would have some evidence going against this, I would kind of suspect. I wonder if it has to do with the with

manipulation of the owner's attention. So, you know, when you put down some IKEA instructions on the floor, the cat may very well noticed that the owner is paying a lot of attention to those instructions, and that by coming and sitting on top of the instructions, it could very well be like, we'll pay attention to me. Huh, well

maybe so. I mean, I haven't looked at any literature on this, but I imagine anyone out there has ever tried to set and work using a laptop, you'll have that scenario where the cat perhaps wishes to be fed, and it's gonna it's gonna want to hang out right next to you, sometimes with its front paws on your mouse pad, sometimes even attacking your hand if you move the mouse around, so um I I wouldn't put it

past them. Um, I guess the The one thought that does come to mind is that if the cat wants your attention, usually the cat will come to you, you know, like you would have to be rather close to those instructions, and at least in my own household, I see the cat drawn to those uh I key instructions or lego instructions, even if they are just you know, left to the side and they're not really being engaged with by by

the humans. That's a good point. I feel like the occupation often takes place when your back is turned, you know, you you go look at something else, then you come back and and the cat or in my case even the dog is on top of whatever flat thing you've just put on the floor. Yeah, and now yeah, I mean, I guess I'm I'm less inclined to think that the cat is going to be playing three D chess with with you know, the social arrayment entremants of the house.

But then again, you do get into explanations for say, um uh inappropriate urination in cats where it's tied to uh the smells associated with owners and stuff like that. So so there are some complex scenarios going on that that maybe don't seem as a parent to you know, the human owners of of the beings, because a part of it comes down to the fact that that any animal in your house, any pet, beat a dog or a cat, they're going to live in a different sensory

realm than you do. You know, the parameters of that sense realm are different, and of course just cognitively and socially, they're different from ms as well. Thank well, maybe the following will shed some kind of light. I'm not sure it will, but but we'll try. So. This study that was cited in that article by Jennifer will Let that

inspired me to want to talk about this today. Uh. This study was published in the journal Applied Animal Behavior Science and it is by Gabriella E. Smith, Philippe A. Sward, and Sarah E. Biocier. It is called if I fits I sits colan, a citizen science investigation into illusory contour susceptibility in domestic cats Felis sylvestris catus. And essentially this study built off of this observation or you know, people have been posting all their cats square pictures on the internet.

They make a square made out of tape on the floor. The cat, for some reason, we don't know quite why, but for some reason comes and sits within the square. The authors here we're looking into the question will cats do that even for a square that isn't there but is merely suggested by a visual illusion? And I thought this was a great question, you know, like, do do other animals see the same optical illusions that we do? And it appears, at least in some cases, they do.

So this study was about whether they would fall for a particular known visual illusion that's been documented for I think at least several decades, now known as the Kanitza contour illusion, named after an Italian psychologist named Gitano Kanitza. And of course, if you want to picture a kanitsa square, you can look it up on the internet. But I'll try to describe it. Imagine a square that isn't there, but is suggested by the mouths of four pac men.

So if you take a pac man or basically it's just a disk with one quarter of it removed, and then you face them at as if they were each biting the corner of a square, but there is no square. It's just the pac man with their mouths all turned in at at four different corners. The visual illusion that's

created is the illusion of a non existent square. And so, to quote from the the abstract of this article, the authors here right, Uh, they want they wanted to know if cats are also susceptible quote to sitting in enclosures that are illusory in nature, use utilizing cats attraction to box like spaces to assess their perception of the kanitza square visual illusion. And so the interesting thing about the study was that it basically crowd sourced. It's it's data

collection uh. To continue eating quote carried out during the COVID nineteen pandemic. This study randomly assigned citizen science participants booklets of six randomized counterbalance daily stimuli to print out, prepare, and place on the floor in pairs. Owners observed and video recorded their cat's behavior with the stimuli, and reported findings from home over the course of six daily trials.

The study ultimately reached over five hundred pet cats and cat owners, and of those, thirty completed all the studies trials. This is one of the major limitations of like of crowdsourcing citizen science. Right there, because they had a large dropout rate, But the authors continue, of these nine cats, subjects selected at least one stimulus by sitting within the contours illusory or otherwise with all limbs for at least

three seconds. The study revealed that cats selected the Kanitza illusion just as often as the square and more often than the control, indicating that domestic cats may treat the subjective Kanitza contours as they do real contours. Given the drawbacks of citizen science projects such as participant attrition, again that's the people who dropped out of the study as it went on, future research would benefit from replicating the

study and controlled settings. To the best of our knowledge, this investigation is the first of its kind in three regards a citizen science study of cat cognition, a formal examination the cats attraction to two D rather than three D enclos posures. So this would be the first thing studying the squares and not just the boxes, and study into cats susceptibility to illusory contours in an ecologically relevant paradigm.

So there are the obvious caveats that that we mentioned having to do with like the difficulty of conducting a crowdsourced experiment of this kind, and it probably needs to be backed up with other research under more controlled conditions.

That the authors do point out that there was a study, I think from nineteen eight that also found some evidence of perception of visual illusions such as the Knitza square in cats, but I think these were in lab trained cats who had been conditioned to sort of press a button when they saw a square in order to get a food reward. And when the cats were presented with a Knitza square where there actually isn't a square, they press the button. So it seems like they do perceive

the same visual illusions that we do. And actually was looking up I was like, are there other examples of cats responding to visual illusions that that effect humans? And yes there are. I came across an example that I thought was really interesting. Uh, this was about the rotating snakes illusion, which I thought was just delightful. So the rotating snake's illusion is a type of illusory motion where a static image appears to be moving. Robert, I've attached

an image for you to stare at. I don't know if you're getting the illusory motion, but I absolutely am. In fact, I'm getting a little bit dizzy looking at this right now, I need to scroll down. Um. But uh So, there was a study published in the journal Psychology inteen by both at ALL called Cats and Allusory Motion. First, they note the anecdotal documentation of cats reacting to the

rotating snake's illusion, which is uh. They document a bunch of videos of cats, especially kittens, being presented with a print out of one of these illusions, and to describe it, the rotating snakes are essentially a bunch of different discs that have um that have different colors within the rings of the disks, and the way the colors are arranged causes the disks to appear to be kind of rotating

or slithering around even though they're not moving. And anyway, this study documented how some cats had been observed to react to static print outs of this illusion by attacking them, essentially trying to prey on them as if they were snakes moving around on the page. Uh, and that this was supported by a cat owner survey that tried this out on a bunch of cats and and found Yeah, at least twenty nine percent of respondents said that their cat reacted to this illusion. And Rob, I've got some

videos attached if you want to take a look. One thing that I thought was interesting about this was that, according to the survey of pet owners, cats that responded to the illusion were on average two point four years younger than cats that did not react to the illusion, and the authors hypothesized this result from the beginning, not because they thought that younger cats would be more likely to see the illusion, but just because younger cat are

more likely on average to react to motion within their visual field by attacking it, and older cats, I think, are more likely to see the illusion at the same rate. But just be like, yeah, so what, Yeah, the videos are interesting here. I have not tried this out on my own cat. I'm tempted to. But on the other hand, this pattern looks like and this experiment looks like it was perhaps created by by Big Printer inc uh to get me to blow through my ank a lot faster.

But still, I I mean, if it enriches the cat at all, I'm I'm all for it. But I wonder if she, since she's an older cat, she may I don't know, she might not be that into it. It would be interesting to see. But anyway, these studies, you know, they make it clear that Okay, cats do respond to at least some of the visual illusions that humans do.

It seems that, uh, if the results of the new study or valid, then then cats do seem to react to kinitza contours the illusory squares sort of the same way that they react to real squares laid out in tape on the floor, and that they do seem to react, at least in some cases to these, uh, these static discs as if they are snakes moving around on the page that must be squatted and tortured, as is a cat's noble duty. Uh. It just one more side note because before I leave this topic, I came across this

as well, the question do fish perceive illusory motion? Uh? There was a study published in Nature Scientific Reports in fourteen by gory at All that looked into okay, do fish fall for the rotating snakes illusion? And they used a conditioning task where we're fish were supposed to respond to motion by doing a certain thing, and then when they when you sub in the rotating snakes, do they fall for it? And it looks like sometimes they do. So even fish perceives some of the same visual illusions

that humans do. Interesting. Yeah, when it comes to cats and the illusion of a box. The only other thing that's coming to mind, and again this is something that is a product of their their unnatural habitats inside of a human house, is that if you have light coming through a window, it may you know, it may take on um, you know, a square, rectangular or vaguely rectangular form on a bed or the floor, and then they

know are gonna be drawn to it. But of course there's a thermal payoff for for for taking a nap in that square. Uh. And obviously that's not going to be the case if you just outline a square with tape or have one of these illusory squares created with these pac men. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a really good point. And I was thinking about the same thing. I was thinking.

Are our cats um drawn to squares because of some kind of evolved adapted behavior or because of a conditioned behavior that is very common within with living in human houses? You know, is there something about living in human houses that overtime teaches cats that when there's a square shaped thing on the floor, I should go sit on that.

Or is this something you would see, say wildcat's doing when present it with the opportunity, right, I mean, it seems like like the wild version of this would be uh, sunlight that is filtered through a tree canopy. So but I mean be square shaped. Yeah, it wouldn't be square shaped. So it seems like that. I mean, I could be wrong, but it seems like that would would certainly overpower any cubicle or rectangular thinking that might emerge during their they're

they're they're ultimately brief air of captivity. Yeah, I would not be surprised if somebody was actually able to identify a way in which, like domestic cats that live in human houses are more likely to sit on squares. I don't know exactly what the reason would be. I think the light through the windows of very good guess, but something like that that they're used to seeking out and getting a reward for seeking out that's roughly square shaped

on the floor. Now, if we're thinking about thermal differences, I guess it is also worth thinking about if you have, say you have a shipment come in, um, you know, it's you know, some sort of like Amazon box or whatever, and you bring that in the house. If it's uh, if it's if it's hot outside, if that box has been setting in a delivery vehicle, then there's probably a thermal difference in that box too. Oh interesting, Yeah, the fresh boxes even warmer. But then again, the reverse would

be true, right if it's been on a box. If that box has been setting, uh, you know, in a delivery vehicle all day or for a couple of days and it's cold out, then it seems like there would be an unattractive thermal difference in that box. So do cats get in the box faster in the summer or does it not make a difference. Yeah, yeah, I don't know. Alright, Well, maybe we're just gonna have to call it there for

part one. Part one will be about about cats seeking out these box and square shaped enclosures, and then we're gonna come back in part two and talk about humans.

Yeah sounds good. It should should be fun because, um, I think if we if we're fair, there are a lot of situations where humans have and continue uh to draw towards enclosure enclosures, you know, small spaces in the comfort of small spaces, and so it Yeah, it'll be interesting to go from the realm of cats uh sitting and fitting in boxes to humans doing something along the same lines. It fits. Therefore, I am yeah all right.

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