cat plays shell game, is really good at it


jts

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Object permanence, the understanding that to disappear from perception is not necessarily to disappear from existence. Lacking it is the reason peek-a-boo is thrilling — the infant witnessed you cease to exist and then is excited to see that you exist, again. Dogs achieve object permanence earlier than humans.

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Very funny and charming, but of course cheating is very easy. Just don't publish the articles that don't confirm your thesis, um... I mean. don't show the videos that don't contain the desired result. That's called the file drawer effect.

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1 hour ago, Max said:

Very funny and charming, but of course cheating is very easy. Just don't publish the articles that don't confirm your thesis, um... I mean. don't show the videos that don't contain the desired result. That's called the file drawer effect.

Hi Max.

Wouldn’t the successes yet show what some of the felines can do?

We could throw out 99% of some test’s results, but that wouldn’t affect the proposition “some people can ... get a perfect score on this test.”

“That species can get a perfect score on that test” is then true, even though 99% of the results don’t happen to help support it.

In any case, I have owned many cats and dogs (the latter of which I trained to point game in the field) and I have looked into object permanence research and the video offered looks to me like about average skill a cat can attain after moderate training.

My best would be to say they do it the way we do it — in their mind they see the thing is “right there” and they keep track as it moves a couple times. They’re highly evolved predators and you see to it during training that their successes equate to mouth treats, that’s how you hack them.

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Sorry, I took you for meaning the dumb ones’ failures are ignored, but you surely meant the fails, period, are ignored.

Do have experience with cats? Allowed outdoors? You’ve watched them while they are outdoors? In my experience the intelligence depicted in the video just scratches the surface of cats’ abilities.

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1 hour ago, Jon Letendre said:

Hi Max.

Wouldn’t the successes yet show what some of the felines can do?

We could throw out 99% of some test’s results, but that wouldn’t affect the proposition “some people can ... get a perfect score on this test.”

It wouldn't affect that proposition, but neither would it prove it. The file drawer effect or publication bias is a serious problem in many research fields, like psychology or medicine, not ot mention more dubious fields (it's the way to "prove" with spurious significance values desired theories.)

1 hour ago, Jon Letendre said:

“That species can get a perfect score on that test” is then true, even though 99% of the results don’t happen to help support it.

In any case, I have owned many cats and dogs (the latter of which I trained to point game in the field) and I have looked into object permanence research and the video offered looks to me like about average skill a cat can attain after moderate training.

My best would be to say they do it the way we do it — in their mind they see the thing is “right there” and they keep track as it moves a couple times. They’re highly evolved predators and you see to it during training that their successes equate to mouth treats, that’s how you hack them.

If the skill is genuine, I think the cat uses a different strategy. In the video you can see that the cat sometimes doesn't look at all at the cups, so it wouldn't have been able to keep track of the right one. I think a more likely explanation is that it reacts to the sound of the ball. No need to keep track of the relevant cup, it just hears under which cup the ball is still rolling a bit at the end, That said, I think that a perfect score as in the video is unlikely, so there probably has been some cherry picking for the end result.

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23 minutes ago, Jon Letendre said:
Sorry, I took you for meaning the dumb ones’ failures are ignored, but you surely meant the fails, period, are ignored.
Do have experience with cats? Allowed outdoors? You’ve watched them while they are outdoors? In my experience the intelligence depicted in the video just scratches the surface of cats’ abilities.

 

Almost my whole life I've lived with cats. Only when the last one died, 18 years old, we've decided not to take another cat, as that one would probably survive us, and that is an unbearable idea to us, as we've no idea what would become of it then. And yes, they can be clever. When it suits them.

 

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To be convincing, the video would have to be done in one take, and many more times. It's not, and the lack of that makes me think the video creator simply spliced together the successful runs. 

I love cats and would like this to be true, but the video does not show it.

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