Cats love boxes so much they'll even sit in fake ones - Livescience.com

Now a citizen science project suggests they like to seat themselves within the outlines of squares just as much as they would like to plant down in real ones, showing that cats (like their human owners) can be fooled by optical illusions.

This urge, at times affectionately dubbed "if I fits I sits," isn't limited to 3D boxes — in 2017, cat fans posted a flurry of photos on Twitter revealing that simply taping the outlines of squares onto floors could prompt cats to step inside.

After hearing a lecture on how dogs reacted to visual illusions and returning home to play with her roommate's cat, study lead author Gabriella Smith, an animal cognition scientist at Hunter College's Thinking Dog Center in New York, "wondered if cats' tendency to sit in squares on the floor would extend to illusory squares," she told Live Science.

Once the owners had taped the shapes onto the floor, they let their cats into the room.

"Due to known research that cats behave most naturally in familiar settings like the home, the citizen science format of this study was the perfect match," Smith said.

The researchers found the felines chose the illusory square seven times, nearly as much as the eight times the cats chose the real squares, "indicating that they were susceptible to the illusion," Smith said.

Oddly, one time one of the cats, Totoro, chose the third "control" choice, where the Pac Man shapes were placed in a way that should not have generated an illusion.

It remains a mystery what drives cats to sit in boxes, or real or illusory squares.

"Cats may like boxes or laundry baskets due to the comforting pressure they provide," Smith said.

The attraction to squares on a floor, real or illusory, may therefore stem from their instinctive weakness for boxes, Smith noted.