The “If I fits, I sits” instinct: Cats will sit in a box even it’s an illusion (cat pics inside)

Cats love boxes. It’s thought that this behaviour is driven by animal instinct: as ambush predators they’re attracted to confined places where they can hide, observe prey and feel safe.

The calming effect of this curious habit was proven in 2014, when a study carried out at the University of Utrecht found that shelter cats provided with boxes to hide in recovered more quickly and adapted to their new environments more easily than their box-less counterparts.

Now, a citizen science project led by Gabriella Smith from Columbia University, New York, has found that this behaviour is so ingrained in cats that they are even drawn to sit in square shapes created by optical illusions.

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The researchers asked cat owners to set up different shapes on their living room floors to see if the cats were compelled to sit in them. Some simply made a square out of tape on the floor while others set up an optical illusion known as the Kanizsa square – an arrangement of four Pac-Man-like shapes positioned to look as if they are forming the four corners of a square.

The Kanizsa figures trigger the perception of an actual square existing by tricking the brain into filling in the missing information. They also set-up a Kanizsa control pattern in which the Pac-Man shapes were reversed so no optical illusion was created.

They then had the owners record their cats’ behaviour over six days.

“The cats in this study stood or sat in the Kanizsa and square stimuli more often than the Kanizsa control, revealing susceptibility to illusory contours and supporting our hypothesis that cats treat an illusory square as they do a real square,” the researchers said.

The team say that the trial is limited by its small sample size, of the original 561 cat owners that signed up just 30 made it all the way through the experiment. But the findings confirm pre-existing research of cats’ susceptibility to optical illusions.