A squirrel plays with Tita and her kitten at the house of Ruben Gaviria in Envigado near Medellin February 16, 2010.
Is spending hours a day looking at images of adorable felines a complete waste of time? Well according to one tech firm, it doesn’t have to be.
The BBC reports that app developer Memrise has harnessed the power of cute kittens in order to teach people new languages.
According to tests completed by the tech firm, images of cats helped improve users’ memories when learning words and phrases from another language.
“The pattern began to emerge that pictures of cats always featured disproportionately among the most effective,” Ben Whately, chief operating officer at Memrise told the BBC.
With Memrise’s new app CatAcademy, customers can spend hours scrolling through crowd sourced photographs of cats that comically coincide with the words scribbled across the bottom of image all the while improving the users cognitive ability to remember the phrases at a later date.
[BBC]