鈥淚 HEAR and I forget; I see and I remember; I do and I understand.鈥� So said Confucius, but a study of how cats cope with obstacles suggests he may have been wrong about all that: it鈥檚 the doing that makes the memory last.
Keir Pearson and David McVea at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, studied how cats know to raise their hind legs to step over barriers without looking back. In one experiment, they used a bowl of food to make a cat pause just after its front legs had stepped over a barrier. Even if the pause lasted 10 minutes, the cat still remembered exactly where the obstacle was and how high to lift its hind legs to step over it.
In contrast, cats that encountered the food before stepping over the barrier with their front legs quickly forgot to step over it at all and stumbled against it with all four legs. The front legs even taught the hind ones to remember the location and height of obstacles the cats were never allowed to see ().
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The researchers are hoping to test whether rock climbers鈥� hand motions similarly inform what their feet do, Pearson says.
