Complex Numbers

Curiosity

Scientists have studied cats. This is not news. (Mews?) But these scientists studied why cats like to settle into boxes.

What cats’ love of boxes and squares can tell us about their visual perception  
"Vision has evolved to answer questions having to do with boundaries and contours."

Some things about cat behavior might make sense if you think about it. Like how their vision is adapted for lower light levels, and they're often active at night. But the box thing? It's not like cats and boxes evolved in parallel. There were cats. And then there were humans. And then the humans made boxes, and cats lived happily ever after.

It is a truth universally acknowledged—at least by those of the feline persuasion—that an empty box on the floor must be in want of a cat.

Gotta love articles that start out parodying Jane Austen.

This behavior is generally attributed to the fact that cats feel safer when squeezed into small spaces, but it might also be able to tell us something about feline visual perception.

Okay, that's not so obvious.

That's the rationale behind a new study in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science with a colorful title: "If I fits I sits: A citizen science investigation into illusory contour susceptibility in domestic cats (Felis silvers catus)."

That title. THAT TITLE.

I am compelled, however to point out that the species nomenclature there is both wrong and outdated. From Wikipedia:

In 2003, the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature ruled that the domestic cat is a distinct species, namely Felis catus. In 2007, it was considered a subspecies, F. silvestris catus, of the European wildcat (F. silvestris) following results of phylogenetic research. In 2017, the IUCN Cat Classification Taskforce followed the recommendation of the ICZN in regarding the domestic cat as a distinct species, Felis catus.

If you click on the link in the article to the actual paper, you'll see they spelled "silvestris" correctly (it's from "woodland" not "silver"), but the date is this year so they should have left that part out entirely.

This is apropos of nothing, really, but when I see a mistake like that I immediately wonder what other errors they're propagating. But I can't be arsed to confirm and cross-reference everything. I mean, look, it's a study on why cats like boxes; it's not, like, the latest epidemiological research or some shit. Just bask in the knowledge that someone managed to get a scientific paper published about the symbiosis between boxes and cats.

Now, I'm finding it difficult to find other sentences in the article that make sense out of context, and there really aren't any; the text builds upon itself. So I'll just leave it at this, but I definitely encourage you to click on the link. The text is pretty short, but it explains everything well; still, if you can't be arsed to read it, it's worth going there just for all the pictures of good kitties.

Why do we study such things when there might not be any direct rewards to reap from them? Well, first of all, you never know what line of research might yield something useful; for instance, I can see how this might have AI applications. And second, not everything has to be useful; sometimes we're just satisfying our own curiosity.

And in this case, fortunately, curiosity didn't kill the cat.