It is an intriguing question whether cats’ social understanding capacity, including the sensitivity to ostensive signals (resulting in fast preferential learning of behavioural choices demonstrated by humans), would be comparable to that in dogs. In a series of A-not-B error tests, we investigated whether the ostensive or non-ostensive manner of human communication and the familiarity of the human demonstrator would affect the search error pattern in companion cats. Cats’ performance showed an almost completely different distribution of perseverative erring than earlier was shown in dogs and human infants. Cats demonstrated perseverative errors both during ostensive and non-ostensive cueing by the owner and also during non-ostensive cueing by the experimenter. However, unlike prior studies with dogs, they avoided perseverative errors during the experimenter ostensive cueing condition. We assume that the reliance on human ostensive signals may serve different purpose in companion dogs and cats—meanwhile in dogs, human ostension could support fast rule learning, in cats, it may have only a circumstantial attention-eliciting effect. Our results highlight the need of conducting further throughout experiments on the social cognition of cats, based on their own right beside the traditional cat–dog comparative approach.

中文翻译：

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在一系列A-not-B错误测试中，猫表现出了对人的表面暗示反应的意外模式。

一个令人感兴趣的问题是，猫的社交理解能力，包括对表面信号的敏感性（导致人类对行为选择的快速优先学习）是否可以与狗相提并论。在一系列的A-not-B错误测试中，我们调查了人类交流的表面或非表面方式以及人类示威者的熟悉程度是否会影响伴侣猫的搜索错误模式。猫的行为表现出持久性错误的分布与狗和人类婴儿中表现出的分布几乎完全不同。猫在主人的剧烈和非剧烈提示期间以及实验者的非剧烈提示期间均表现出持久性错误。但是，与先前对狗的研究不同，他们避免了实验者表面暗示性提示条件下的持续性错误。我们假设依赖人类的表面信号在伴侣犬和猫中可能有不同的目的-同时在狗中，人类的表面张力可以支持快速规则学习，在猫中，它可能仅具有间接的引起注意的作用。我们的结果强调，除了传统的猫狗比较方法外，还需要根据猫的自身权利对整个猫的社会认知进行进一步的实验。