With the weather being so cold lately, my cat nova doesn't hesitate to find the warmest spot in the house. Often, that is half a foot in front of the space heater I have running. I have begun to wonder what awareness she has of the heater and what it is.

She must know that heat emanates from it, but has she connected that I am the one who turns it on and that it doesn't just come on and off as "it pleases"? Even if she does somehow know that I am the one responsible for turning it on, how mystifying that must be for her to consider that this otherwise "useless" dark object can magically create "heat" out of nothing.

I have seen cats stare at a door handle, surely having observed that when a human touches it the door opens, so they can obviously learn at least basic relationships between physical objects through observation, but something like a heater (or a light turning on) involve an unobservable process that has to be outside their understanding of the physical universe. In other words, I imagine a cat could understand the concept of the physical door blocking the physical "space" of the doorway, but could they understand how when we touch an object, heat happens? Or, again, do they think the heat just happens because they can't actually see how we make it happen? They see us touch it to make it turn on, but they also touch it yet it doesn't turn on.