Visual communicative signals in cat-human and dog-human interactions

Miklosi and colleagues compared how cats and dogs use and respond to human visual communicative signals, particularly pointing gestures indicating hidden food. Both species could follow human pointing to locate food, showing that cats, like dogs, can use human-given cues, though cats were generally less likely to initiate communication with the human when a task became unsolvable. In that impossible-task condition, dogs reliably looked back at the person, seemingly seeking help, whereas cats did so far less, reflecting their different social evolution. The study demonstrated that domestic cats possess some capacity to read human referential gestures while differing from dogs in their tendency to engage humans in problem solving, illuminating both shared and divergent aspects of how these two domesticated species communicate with people.