Overview

• More than 500 cat owners in Germany, Turkey, Italy and Canada have contributed smartphone footage since the August launch of the citizen-science project.
• Participants filmed cats sleeping on either side, pawing for treats and carrying their tails in varied postures to address specific research questions.
• The team is now collating and coding these videos to test how lateralized behaviors reveal neural mechanisms and emotional states.
• This effort builds on a YouTube-based finding that most cats favor left-side sleeping, suggesting right-hemisphere advantage in threat detection.
• The distributed data-collection model circumvents traditional lab constraints and offers an unprecedented scale for noninvasive neurobehavioral inference in domestic cats.