Cats rival dogs on many tests of social smarts

After years when scientists largely ignored social intelligence in cats, labs studying feline social cognition have popped up around the globe, and a small but growing number of studies is showing that cats match dogs in many tests of social smarts. In the first study to directly compare how cats and dogs communicate with people, he and colleagues conducted the pointing test at pet owners’ homes. Similar work, published by Italian researchers in 2015, was the first to show that cats, like dogs, can shape their behavior to human emotions—something many pet owners may have suspected but that hadn’t been scientifically demonstrated.

Source: www.sciencemag.org