Owners cats and dogs. The age-old question lingers: which species shows greater cleverness, and which better understands people? The first question resists a clean answer because comparing such different animals is inherently tricky. In some ways dogs appear sharper; in others, cats seem equally astute. The second question, though, might be easier to settle. A research team from Hungary designed a study to test whether dogs or cats respond more accurately to human actions.
“The dog represents a unique subject for studying interspecies communication and serves as a promising model for pre-verbal human interaction,” the study notes, while also reporting that cats display several dog-like abilities.
To gauge which species grasps humans best, the researchers directly compared dogs and cats under identical conditions, examining how they respond to human movements and signals. Ensuring uniform testing conditions was essential for making meaningful comparisons.
In an object selection task, cats tended to make fewer choices than dogs in a laboratory setting, and their willingness to decide declined as trials continued.
The cats could be tested a bit more at home, where their willingness to choose did not fade over time and older individuals performed better. Dogs demonstrated more decisive choices than cats, regardless of the type of gesture used and at both group and individual levels.
“Despite the two species sharing a long history as human companions, the results align with earlier work suggesting that cats, compared with dogs, are not as ideal a model for studying certain human communication skills in laboratory settings.”
The dogs’ special sensitivity
Throughout the studies, researchers observed that domestication shaped dogs to adapt to a social environment involving humans and to acquire a suite of human-friendly socio-cognitive skills. This likely supported their survival in human-made habitats.
Dogs show sensitivity to where people are looking and to a variety of body movements. Head turns, body orientation, leaning, and finger pointing can all serve as communicative cues for dogs.
Both young dogs and adults respond to signaling, and adults also appear to interpret cues that can be described as referential gestures, pointing toward a target.
Their two-way choice tasks revealed a heightened responsiveness to human signals in dogs, though this sensitivity can sometimes lead to misinterpretation.
Cats, meanwhile, have historically lived closer to human settlements yet relied less on humans for daily behavior and sustenance. The dog’s ancestor lived in social groups with complex interactions, while the feline ancestor tended toward solitary territorial dominance, with limited interaction outside mating periods. Territoriality remains a feature in both species, yet cats often keep a fixed roaming range that centers around food sources, whereas canids display more fluid patterns in access to resources, often spanning broader territories outside core regions.
Cats may be more reserved
Initial tests faced a notable hurdle: only 34 of 62 domestic cats brought in by their owners could participate, due to shyness or low motivation despite treats. Dogs, however, faced no such exclusion. The task itself was straightforward: two containers sat on the floor, one holding a food reward. The experimenter pointed to the baited container, and the animal chose. Overall, dogs proved more resourceful, locating the reward more often than cats, according to study co-author Melitta Csepregi.
The study also found that cats became increasingly reluctant to choose as trials progressed, whereas dogs maintained engagement across the testing period. When some cats were tested at home, the pattern persisted: their general success lagged behind that of dogs, even though their home environment reduced some stressors.
Several explanations were offered for these differences. Cats might have been less attentive, less motivated by food rewards, or unsettled by unfamiliar handling during testing, according to lead researcher Márta Gácsi. In contrast, dogs are a social species that have been shaped by selective breeding to interact and cooperate with humans. This divergence in social orientation helps explain why cats rely less on human communication signals in these experimental contexts, as Gácsi notes.
The study references a Nature report published in 2023 for broader context on these findings. These results contribute to a growing view that dogs are more attuned to human cues in laboratory settings, while cats show subtler or different forms of social understanding. A note on the study’s limitations and methodology appears in the cited work, emphasizing environmental factors and species-specific temperaments.
The environment that researchers used may also have influenced outcomes. The investigation suggests that cultural and ecological contexts can shape how each species interacts with human signals, and that future work should consider more ecologically valid scenarios to further illuminate how dogs and cats communicate with people.
Additional discussion of the study and its implications for understanding animal cognition can be found through a cited source attributed to a recent Nature article.