🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

Whether companion animals understand human communicative gestures bears on how domestication reshapes cognition. This overview surveys research on cats' ability to use human pointing to locate hidden…

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 need more dietary protein than many mammals, and this overview reviews the metabolic basis. Feline liver enzymes that break down amino acids for energy operate at a relatively high, less adjustab…

Although less commonly trained than dogs, cats learn readily through operant conditioning, and this overview surveys research and applied work on training them. It covers the use of positive reinforce…

Oxytocin, a hormone involved in social bonding, has been studied in dogs during owner interaction, and researchers have asked whether cats show comparable hormonal responses. This overview surveys the…

The cat-human relationship has measurable physiological dimensions, and this overview surveys research probing them. It covers studies of behavioural and hormonal responses, including investigations o…

Cats form bonds with specific people, and research has probed how they recognise their humans. This overview surveys evidence that cats identify owners primarily through voice, as shown in vocal-recog…

Self-control tasks, such as choosing a larger delayed reward over a smaller immediate one, probe impulse regulation and have been studied across many species. This overview surveys the limited researc…

A growing body of research asks whether cats are sensitive to whether a human is paying attention to them, a basic component of social cognition. This overview surveys experiments testing whether cats…

A key question raised by findings of secure and insecure attachment in cats is whether those styles are stable traits or transient states. This overview surveys evidence on the consistency of feline a…

Animal domestication is often described as following three routes: a commensal pathway, a prey pathway and a directed pathway. This overview focuses on the commensal model as applied to cats, in which…

Smell is a major sense for cats, supported by an olfactory epithelium lined with sensory neurons expressing a large family of odorant receptor genes. This overview surveys what is known about the feli…

Research into why cats find silver vine and catnip rewarding has pointed to the involvement of the body's opioid system. This overview surveys evidence that the rubbing and rolling response engages en…

Among terrestrial mammals, cats have one of the highest upper hearing limits, extending well into the ultrasonic range. This overview surveys audiogram data placing the feline ceiling far above the ro…

Merola and colleagues tested whether cats engage in social referencing, looking to a human for emotional information about an ambiguous situation. Cats and owners were presented with a potentially ala…

Isabella Merola, Marta Lazzaroni, Sarah Marshall-Pescini, Emanuela Prato-Previde · Animal Cognition · 2015

When confronted with an ambiguous, potentially frightening object such as a noisy fan, do cats look to their owner for guidance? In this experiment owners reacted to the object with either a positive…

Isabella Merola and colleagues · Animal Cognition · 2015

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

Lipinski and colleagues used a panel of genetic markers to characterize the population structure of cat breeds and worldwide random-bred cats. They found that most modern cat breeds are relatively rec…

Monika J. Lipinski, Lutz Froenicke, Kathryn C. Baysac, et al. · Genomics · 2008

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…

Adam Miklosi, Peter Pongracz, Gabriella Lakatos, Jozsef Topal, Vilmos Csanyi · Journal of Comparative Psychology · 2005