We had to cat sit a few times over the last six months, and Cat World isn't an easy place to understand.

Cats don't appear to have a good serial memory, so they can remember places and times up to a point, but not quite well enough to integrate them into a conceptual whole.

One cat was cute and sweet tempered, but also timid and really rather slow. We eventually worked out that she couldn't make the connection between the corridor that led to the kitchen in daylight, and the same corridor after dark.

She acted as if they were two completely different and unrelated spaces. So she had to timidly re-explore both every day, which caused non-trivial confusion because some of the things in the corridor already had her scent on them.

Every cat is different. Some can be downright neurotic, just like us. They also get senile in old age. I had the pleasure of growing into adulthood alongside a cat. He died 2 months shy of 20. He taught me a lot.