With behavioral techniques, cats were trained to discriminate a point-light animation sequence depicting biological motion (i.e., a cat walking) from an animation sequence consisting of equivalent local motion vectors lacking the global synchrony present in the biological-motion sequence (i.e., “foil” displays). Successful discrimination was evidenced for even the most difficult foil display and for different versions of the biological-motion sequence, indicating that cats are able to extract the higher order kinematic invariants embodied in these novel motion displays.
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