[HN Gopher] Scientists have studied the behavior of cats sitting...
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Scientists have studied the behavior of cats sitting on squares
(2021)
Author : Tomte
Score : 60 points
Date : 2024-04-27 15:51 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.vice.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.vice.com)
| bediger4000 wrote:
| Cats are susceptible to some optical illusions is what I take
| away.
|
| In a larger sense, optical illusions mean we can't "trust our
| eyes" as many exhort us to do. Does this mean those urging us to
| trust our eyes are hucksters or trying to manipulate us?
| bckr wrote:
| The reason we have a word for optical illusions is because they
| are outliers. They represent examples of when your optical
| sense needs to be checked against other perceptions.
| bediger4000 wrote:
| I'd buy that except that the umbrella term "optical illusion"
| covers a lot of ground from simple physical things like a
| blind spot, through those color inverting things, to weird
| ones that involve computation, where you can't see all 16
| dots, or the jagged blocks "heal" themselves. Cats perceiving
| squares is clearly not optical, but rather computational.
| xoa wrote:
| > _In a larger sense, optical illusions mean we can 't "trust
| our eyes" as many exhort us to do._
|
| No, that's not what it (necessarily) means. A lot of optical
| illusions are specifically engineered to exploit biology or
| evolutionary gaps, some of which are due to path dependency but
| others which are likely very sensible in the ultra typical non-
| synthetic non-adversarial environment. As the article here
| says:
|
| > _"Many animals are evolved to perform this sort of
| perception," said Smith. "It's probably to do with navigating
| the environment. You need to know when not to walk into a tree
| or off a cliff."_
|
| Another way to think of this is "ability to perform high speed
| object inference from partial information", and it makes a lot
| of sense this would be pretty important. Much of the natural
| world is full of woods and grass land where important objects
| are only seen through a 3D overlay of grass/leaf/branch cover.
| The examples there might be real but even more so are probably
| biological ones, like "huh I think that's the shape of a
| predator hiding there". That's the sort of thing that'd have
| some real evolutionary pressure. I think we generally take for
| granted being able to infer what something is from highly
| minimal information with great reliability normally but it's
| not like it's a given.
|
| So "trust, but verify" while also recognizing sometimes it's
| better to err on the side of caution. For technologists doing
| human UI design there are probably usability and safety
| considerations related to some of this too, designers can make
| use of negative space in useful and harmful ways. Finally it's
| fine to just enjoy optical illusions and magic tricks and so on
| both for their cleverness and what they reveal about ourselves
| without leaping to some sort of silly "hucksters/manipulators"
| thing.
| whitmank wrote:
| This article loads fine but when I scroll down it turns into a
| custom 404 screen?
|
| Anyone else?
| anfractuosity wrote:
| Haha, not heard of cats liking sitting on squares before. I
| wonder if they prefer those to other angular shapes.
|
| Curious if they'd move their sitting position around to sit in
| projected squares too.
| noman-land wrote:
| It is really hilarious. Put a piece of paper on the floor? The
| cat will sit on it. Draw a circle on the floor? The cat will
| sit in it.
| bena wrote:
| We have two cats and they exhibit this behavior even with
| circles made with limbs. Like if I'm sitting at a table with my
| arms in front of me, one cat in particular will see it as an
| invitation to plop himself in the circle. Sometimes he doesn't
| wait for my arms, he'll just stand in front of me until I
| either make a circle for him or I move him. And sometimes, when
| I'm sleeping on my stomach and I'm doing that figure 4 thing
| with my legs, I'll wake up with a cat having a nap in the "leg
| circle".
| huppeldepup wrote:
| Paper:
|
| https://gwern.net/doc/cat/psychology/2021-smith-2.pdf
|
| Edit: check out the main page: https://gwern.net/
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| Offtopic: an adaptive 1-, 2-, 3-column layout in the wild.
| _Wild._
| gwern wrote:
| I'm surprised you noticed! I think you may be the first I've
| seen. Most people just think it's a 1 vs 2 column layout; but
| we didn't find that quite satisfactory...
|
| If you guys like cat optical illusions, they're susceptible
| to a few others as well, like the rotating-snake one:
| https://gwern.net/doc/cat/psychology/index#regaiolli-et-
| al-2... https://gwern.net/doc/cat/psychology/index#szenczi-
| et-al-201...
| sebastianconcpt wrote:
| This is only a mystery to those who can't speak catesse. They are
| playing 4D chess with you and winning.
|
| Joke aside, this has to be linked to their superb spatial
| cognition and maybe their telemetry as they are natural ninjas.
| groovy2shoes wrote:
| Cats, of course, speak Catalan.
| neilv wrote:
| > _Out of 500 cats and owners, only 30 completed the entire
| trial,_
|
| Now test the 500 owners for toxoplasmosis, and correlate.
| DrammBA wrote:
| what correlation would you expect to see?
| a_e_k wrote:
| > _Smith said that she's also curious how this research would
| translate to non-domesticated cats like big, wild cats. "We don't
| know whether wild cats are susceptible to that illusion, because
| they may not encounter corners and walls the same way," Smith
| said._
|
| Given that big cats behave with (proportionally larger) boxes
| much the same way as domestic cats:
|
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=J11uu8L8FTY
|
| I am going to hypothesize that it would translate quite well.
| tim333 wrote:
| Seems to also apply to their 3d equivalent, boxes, and to larger
| cat species.
| https://www.google.co.uk/imgres?q=cats%20boxes&imgurl=https%...
|
| My guess is the function is two fold - camouflage and protection
| from cat attackers like dogs, and camouflage for pouncing on prey
| - mice, bits of string etc.
| krackers wrote:
| It remains an open problem whether this generalizes
| 4-dimensional surfaces as well.
| plusplusungood wrote:
| Funny, a kid at my son's science fair did this for their project.
| I don't recollect if he had a bibliography...
| whartung wrote:
| I would think this would be old news.
|
| "Cat, get off of the table."
|
| "I'm not on the table, I'm on the placemat."
|
| Cat logic.
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