I’ve been meaning to write a post on animal intelligence for a couple of weeks, but have been sidetracked by work (and life). A few recent stories kicked off the motivation to write it, first and foremost this story on feline memories: “Feline memories found to be fleeting” (h/t babs67), which was originally linked to through Yahoo news.
It’s an interesting scientific study. The researchers wanted to know how a cat coordinates motion of front legs with back legs. The researchers first let a cat step over an obstacle with its front legs, then distracted it with food and determined how long they could distract a cat before it would forget to lift its back legs to clear the obstacle. It turns out that the magic number is somewhere around ten minutes, i.e. cats have a muscle memory of about ten minutes. However, when they distracted the cat before it had cleared the obstacle, so that it only had its visual memory to remind it of the barrier, “The main surprise was how short lasting the visual memory on its own was—just a few seconds when animals were stopped before their forelegs stepped over the obstacle.”
Skulls in the Stars 