And the Oscar goes to . . .

[wnylib]

7. Cause and effect. Cats are good at connecting them and

learning that way. That cat was a little smarter than the average cat, maybe because he was half Siamese.

When my current cat was a kitten, I saw her doing deliberate experiments a few times in the process of investigating the world. It was interesting and amusing. One time, she got hold of a crochet project in my yarn bag and dragged it out onto the floor. Naturally, it started to unravel as she pulled it. When she noticed that, she dragged it around the dining room, frequently looking back to see the results. She walked around the table and chair legs, checking to see if the line of yarn followed her. She created quite a web between those furniture legs and then paused to admire it.

I should have stopped her from unraveling my project, but it was too amusing and amazing to interrupt. She was totally entranced with her experiment.

Other times, after watching me touch the keys on my laptop and seeing the screen's appearance change, she started touching the keys herself to see what would happen. One day I paused a video while I went to the kitchen to get a snack. When I returned, the video was playing again and the cat was watching it. I don't think she knew specifically which key to touch, but when she hit on the one that unpaused the video, she liked the result.

Cats learn a lot by observation and trial and error.