If you’re a cat owner, you probably recognize it all too well. You’re trying to get the attention of your feline friend by shouting his or her name, but half of the time, they’ll just ignore you completely.

It’s a lot less complicated with a dog: if you call the name of a canine four-footer, chances are they’ll just come running towards you. So what’s the deal exactly with cats?

For a long time, it was actually uncertain if cats actually recognized and understood their own names. A recent study done in Japan confirmed that felines do actually know their names after all!

Researchers from the Sophia University led by Dr. Atsuko Saito concluded that kittens can actually understand their own names, as it’s more likely they’ll respond to humans calling their name than something else.

“Researchers have only recently begun to investigate cats’ ability to communicate with humans,” the paper reads that was published in the Scientific Reports journal.

For their research, Dr. Saito and the rest of his research team actually recruited 78 cats from a number of households as well as ‘cat cafes’ in the country, to investigate how good their understanding of human speech was.

“Some owners insist their cats can recognize their own names and words related to food. “Cats are sensitive to differences in human voice characteristics.”

The method they used is called a habituation-dishabituation method, and it’s used to see if the felines can discriminate a couple of things that humans said. These consisted of their own names, regular nouns, and names of other cats.

Four different words were used, and the researchers classified a movement of the cat’s ears, head or tail as a response, as well as making noise. Generally, the cats respond to pretty much every word that’s spoken to them with declining interest, but there’s a noticeable difference in response when their own names are being spoken.

The results speak for themselves; cats respond significantly more when their own name is spoken, even when it’s said by someone else than their owner.

“Among cats from ordinary households (…) showed a significant rebound in response to the subsequent presentation of their own names; these cats discriminated their own names from general nouns even when unfamiliar persons uttered them. These results indicate that cats are able to discriminate their own names from other words,” the study says.

However, even though the researches fully believe that the cats recognize their own names, it’s possible that it doesn’t hold a lot of meaning for them.

The felines have probably only learned their name as it was said by their owners often, and they link it with receiving food. For the four-footers, there’s no deep meaning to their names. Yet, they still recognize it, even if it’s just for a meal.

Dr. Kristyn Vitale is an independent researcher from the UK and can definitely agree with the findings of the study, as the results “make complete sense to me”, she said to AP. However, she also emphasizes the link between food and the lack of a deeper meaning.

Nonetheless, if there’s anything this research shows, it’s that cats actually do know their own names.

“We conclude that cats can discriminate the content of human utterances based on phonemic differences,” the abstract of the paper reads.

If you’re interested in the whole research paper, you can read it in full over here.

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Source: AP, Scientific Reports (via Nature.com), Independent