An international research team found that cats prefer to sleep on their left side, potentially as an evolutionary advantage for hunting and escape behavior. Sleeping on the left allows them to process threats with the right hemisphere of the brain, which specializes in spatial awareness and rapid movements.
This study reveals a role for the superior colliculus in higher-order cognition, independent of its role in spatial orienting. Researchers found that the superior colliculus exhibits robust encoding of learned visual categories and its inactivation markedly impaired category decisions in rhesus macaques.
