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Credit: Tilo Hauke (source)
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In celebration of the approaching New Year, I present a list of my most popular science stories of 2009. Taken from the vast expanse of all fields of science, they may not be everyone's top ten, but they are among the top news makers and will have repercussions well past the ending days of 2009.
The original coverage of this article went up on a Friday afternoon. And the rest of the weekend was spent testing friends' cats for handedness. That weekend is what made this research one of the best stories of year. It wasn't just that the science was interesting; it was because we could all go out and do the experiments ourselves.
For long time, researchers thought that humans were the only creatures to exhibit brain lateralization, or the fact that though the halves of our brains look the same, each half has different functions. One classic example of lateralization is handedness. If both sides of the brain worked the same way, humans would not have a strong hand preference. Everyone would be ambidextrous.
However, recent studies have shown that animals from dogs to humpback whales exhibit signs of brain lateralization. In this study, Sarah Millsopp, Animal Behaviorist in the School of Psychology at Queen's University in Belfast and co-author, decided to add another animal to the list.
“We studied handedness in cats as, up until recently, it had received little attention,” she writes. “Lateralized behaivour is important as it gives us a measure of cerebral functional asymmetry which helps us to understand how the brains of different animals work. We were also curious to discover if, like humans, more cats were right-handed than left-handed!”
In the human population, over 90 percent of people are right-handed. For cats, however, the research showed that the split is 50-50. And perhaps even more interesting, that split is along gender lines. Almost all male cats are left-handed, while females prefer the right paw.
The study, published in Animal Behavior, set cats to complex tasks that have to be completed using a single paw, such as getting a piece of food out of the bottom of a glass. By observing which paw was used first and most often, scientists were able to show that cats indeed had a preferred paw, just as humans have a preferred hand.
After the weekend of running experiments with friends' cats, I began to wonder whose cats were used for the official study. After all, it seems like just about any cat would be willing to go through an experiment for a treat at the bottom of a glass. And it turns out to be mostly true.
“My own cat (Bob) took part in this research. He would've been very disappointed to be left out,” writes Millsopp. “Many of my friend's cats took part too. We also carried out some work with rescue cats in shelters here. The rescue cats loved the extra attention and the challenge of the tasks really got them thinking.”
But while many cats were great at the tasks (Millsopp notes that the Burmese breed was especially clever and figured out how to get the treat out quickly), some cats posed a problem. Though not difficult to work with, not all the felines went about the tasks in the right way. “Some cats would attempt to retrieve food from the jar by shoving their heads into the jar,” says Millsopp. “If they settled on this as the only method, that is all they would try to do, and so could not be included in the analyses.”
In the end, though, it was a great study. Not only did it illuminate some of the workings of a cat brain, it is also something anyone can do with their pets.
“Setting your own cat tasks like this, where they have to work for their food, is great enrichment and improves the welfare of your cat,” says Millsopp. “I hope lots of people will test he handedness of their cats now. It is fun for the human owner to watch, and stimulating and exciting for the cat!”
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