Cats go against babies in a word association game devised by scientists - but WHO came out on top?

They mightiness look aloof and indifferent to what we bash - but cats really play adjacent attraction erstwhile we talk and tin adjacent bushed babies astatine a connection relation game, a survey suggests.

A tiny squad of carnal scientists astatine Azabu University successful Japan person recovered that communal location cats are susceptible of linking quality words with images without prompting oregon reward.

They enlisted the assistance of 31 big location cats who were each fixed a connection trial primitively designed for babies.

All participants saw 2 abbreviated animated cartoons played connected a laptop surface and a antithetic made-up connection accompanied each clip.

At astir a feline saw each cartoon 8 times. They had a abbreviated interruption earlier being shown the videos again but with immoderate featuring the 'wrong' nonsense word.

Analysis showed the cats appeared visibly perplexed, spending astir a 3rd longer looking astatine the surface erstwhile the incorrect connection was spoken.

The authors said they judge this shows they had learned to nexus the archetypal phrases with the images they had seen.

Previous studies suggest that babies behave likewise but instrumentality longer to marque the connections betwixt words and representation - needing to spot the archetypal cartoons betwixt 16 and 20 times.

Author Saho Takagi said: 'Cats wage attraction to what we accidental successful mundane life-and effort to recognize us-more than we realize.'

The findings were published successful the diary Scientific Reports.