Like us, our cats have an abstract mental map of roughly where everything is, especially within our home. You don’t need to physically go there to know where the bedroom is relative to where you’re standing, right? So do they, and their primary reason these days for having such mechanisms is to keep track of you, the owner.
Dr. Saho Takugi from Kyoto University conducted a study with 50 cats placed in individual rooms, with their owners only periodically calling from outside. Then they would play either their owner’s or a stranger’s voice. The owners have to rank the shock that the cat felt after entering the room, without knowing which voice played right before they entered.
In his hypothesis, Dr. Takugi predicted that the cats would be more surprised to see their owner come in during or right after their voice was played through the speaker. In the responses recorded, the majority proved the hypothesis correct.
To a cat, its owner is a symbol of food and shelter security, which is something that is necessary for them to live, and assurance that they wouldn’t have to hunt for food and find shelter elsewhere. That is why they evolved to keep track of us, presumably around the time that they were domesticated, millennia ago.
References:
Takagi, S., Chijiiwa, H., Arahori, M., Saito, A., Fujita, K., & Kuroshima, H. (2021). Socio-spatial cognition in cats: Mentally mapping owner’s location from voice. PLOS ONE, 16(11), e0257611. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0257611