This is Scientific Americans 60 Second Science. I'm Jason Goldman. Got a minute?

Psychologist Sajo Tocagi, a graduate student at Kyoto University in Japan strolls into one of Japan's many cat cafes.

These establishments allow customers to pay an hourly fee for the chance to cuddle some cats. They're popular in Japan because so many apartment

buildings forbid pet ownership, but Takagi isn't a typical customer. She's not there

for feline affection, but to probe their minds.

The psychology of domestic cats is still something of a mystery, despite our overwhelming

familiarity with the critters.

They have many skills, she tells me through an interpreter that are not well known even to their owners.

Tukaki and her colleagues wanted to see whether domestic cats have an intuitive understanding of cause and effect.

But to make it a fair test, they decided to let the cats use their ears instead of only their

eyes.

Cats are ambush hunters and rely on their sense of hearing to locate their prey.

The cats, 30 of them, mostly from cat cafes, plus a few pets, were shown a series of demonstrations.

For example, a researcher would shake a box

accompanied by the sound of an object bouncing around inside.

Then the cat would be allowed to see inside the container.

If the cat expects to find a ball inside the box, it should

stare longer if the box turns out to be empty, rather than if the ball was there as expected. Psychologists call this a violation of expectation response.

If they expected a ball and were surprised not to find one, or vice versa, it suggests that

cats have certain expectations about the physical realities of the world.

And the cats did stare longer at those containers that violated their expectations,

as if to suggest that they realized that something in the situation was amiss.

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