Research overview: gaze following and referential cues in cats

Following another's gaze can indicate sensitivity to where attention is directed, and researchers have asked whether cats follow human gaze. This overview surveys the comparatively sparse evidence in cats relative to dogs and other species, examining whether cats reorient toward a location a human looks at and how this relates to following pointing gestures. It considers the difficulty of testing gaze following in cats given their lower compliance in experimental settings, and what positive or negative findings would imply about feline social attention. The survey situates gaze-related research within the broader effort to map cats' use of human social cues, noting that cats clearly attend to human signals in some contexts while the specific capacity for gaze following remains less thoroughly established than other communicative abilities.