There are some debates that will go on forever. They may die down at times, have periods of relative calm even, but the divide will always be there: at heart, you’re a dog or a cat person and anyone who professes to love both equally is lying.

At the very least, we appreciate them in different ways. Cats are more self-sufficient. The bestowal of their fickle love is felt to be a blessing. They can very nearly pick stuff up (God help us all if they ever evolve opposable thumbs). Dogs, meanwhile, spread their affection with abandon, take unbridled joy in simple pleasures, have myriad health benefits and save lives. Not that we’re biased, you understand.

And now, science has again weighed in, and declared dogs are basically twice as smart as cats.

A study from Vanderbilt University, Tennessee, due to appear in Frontiers in Neuroanatomy, says dogs have twice as many neurons in their brains as cats do.

Neurons – described in National Geographic as “basic information-processing units” by one of the study’s authors, neurologist Suzana Herculano-Houzel – point to how “cognitively capable the animal is”.

When comparing brains, the team looked at two different dogs to check whether physical size had an impact, and found that dog brains had roughly 530 million neurons in the cerebral cortex compared to the 250 million in the cat brain, no matter what size dog.

There’s some way to go of course before dogs catch up with humans – we are estimated to possess as many as 16 billion neurons in the corresponding part of the brain – but hey, intelligence manifests itself in different ways and we can’t say we don’t know a couple of people who are slower than our canine pals to pick up on our emotional state.

Neurons are associated with thinking, planning and complex behaviour, and Herculano-Houzel – the university’s associate professor of psychology and biological sciences – says that this points to canines getting one up on their feline friends.

Your dog is twice as smart as a cat, and this study proves it