🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

This study recorded meows from domestic cats across behavioural contexts and analysed their acoustic structure, also testing whether human listeners could assign calls to context. Meows were acoustica…

Nicholas Nicastro, Michael Owren · Journal of Comparative Psychology · 2003

This study tested whether cats modify their behaviour according to their owner's displayed emotion, comparing happy and angry expressions. Cats showed behaviours consistent with detecting the emotiona…

Moriah Galvan, Jennifer Vonk · Animal Cognition · 2016

Using a habituation-dishabituation design, researchers played domestic cats recordings of their owner's voice interspersed with strangers calling their name. Cats showed orienting responses such as ea…

Atsuko Saito, Kazutaka Shinozuka · Animal Cognition · 2013

Researchers shook opaque containers in front of cats; some rattled and some were silent, and the experimenter then tipped each to reveal whether an object fell out. Cats explored more and showed expec…

Saho Takagi and colleagues · Animal Cognition · 2016

Building on emotion research, this study asked whether cats integrate visual and auditory emotional information from both humans and other cats. Cats were presented with facial expressions and vocalis…

Serenella d'Ingeo, Angelo Quaranta and colleagues · Animals · 2020

Across several experiments in homes and a cat cafe, cats were played sequences of four nouns matched in length and accent followed by their own name. Many cats habituated to the nouns but showed renew…

Atsuko Saito, Kazutaka Shinozuka, Yuki Ito, Toshikazu Hasegawa · Scientific Reports · 2019

This study investigated the mechanism by which domestic cats and some other felids produce the continuous purr during both inhalation and exhalation. Measurements indicated that purring arises from ra…

Dawn Sissom, Donald Rice, Gustav Peters · Journal of Zoology · 1991

In this classic experiment, cats that watched a trained demonstrator perform a lever-press for food learned the response faster than cats given only individual trial-and-error experience. The study pr…

E. Roy John and colleagues · Science · 1968

This comparative study applied trait ratings to multiple felid species, including domestic cats, African lions, snow leopards, clouded leopards, and Scottish wildcats, to ask whether personality dimen…

Marieke Gartner, David Powell, Alexander Weiss · Journal of Comparative Psychology · 2014

Allonursing, the nursing of non-offspring, is best documented in lions but reported in other group-living or colonial felid contexts, including domestic cat colonies. This overview surveys research on…

Comparing the domestic cat with its wild ancestor illuminates how domestication has reshaped behaviour. This overview surveys research contrasting African and European wildcats with domestic cats in t…

Cognition has been studied far less in cats than in primates, birds, or dogs, but a coherent picture is emerging across the felid family. This overview synthesises research on object permanence, spati…

Free-ranging domestic cats maintain home ranges whose size and overlap depend on sex, reproductive status, food distribution, and population density. This overview surveys tracking studies showing tha…

Some of the founding experiments of comparative psychology used cats in puzzle boxes to study how animals learn to escape confinement. This overview surveys the historical work in which cats gradually…

Felids scratch trees and other surfaces and create ground scrapes that combine visual marks with scent from glands in the paws. This overview surveys research on the marking function of scratching acr…

Although often called solitary, domestic cats display a flexible social organisation that depends heavily on the distribution of food and shelter. This overview synthesises decades of observation show…

One of the most robust axes of feline personality is a bold-to-shy or confident-to-fearful continuum that shapes how cats respond to novelty, strangers, and handling. This overview surveys research on…

Roughly two-thirds of domestic cats display a stereotyped response to catnip, sniffing, licking, rolling, and rubbing, triggered by the compound nepetalactone acting through the olfactory and vomerona…

Adult cats rarely meow at one another but meow frequently at people, leading to the hypothesis that the meow has been shaped by life alongside humans. This overview surveys research comparing the call…

The vertical tail-up posture is one of the most studied visual signals in domestic cats and is widely interpreted as a friendly intention signal that precedes approach, allorubbing, and amicable inter…

Domestic cats produce a diverse set of vocalisations that researchers have grouped into categories such as murmurs made with a closed mouth, including purrs and trills, vowel-pattern calls such as the…

This detailed developmental study described how kittens in litters engage in social play, cataloguing motor patterns such as the belly-up, stand-up, pounce, and chase, and charting how their frequency…

Meredith West · American Zoologist · 1974

Surveying owners of over two thousand pet cats, researchers used questionnaire ratings to identify five reliable personality dimensions, dubbed the Feline Five: neuroticism, extraversion, dominance, i…

Carla Litchfield and colleagues · PLOS ONE · 2017

Why can lions and tigers roar while domestic cats and cheetahs cannot? This comparative anatomical study examined the hyoid apparatus, the chain of bones supporting the larynx and tongue, across felid…

Gerald Weissengruber and colleagues · Journal of Anatomy · 2002

This widely cited quantitative synthesis estimated that free-ranging domestic cats in the contiguous United States kill billions of birds and tens of billions of mammals annually, with unowned cats re…

Scott Loss, Tom Will, Peter Marra · Nature Communications · 2013