By Anthony HamCats have a reputation for being aloof, but a new study has found that their relationships with their owners may be stronger than we thought.
Cats are often seen as aloof. But in a new study, they were not ignoring their owners, but instead “their reactions were very subtle,” the lead author of the study said.Credit...David W Cerny/Reuters
Every cat owner has a story to tell of being blanked by their cat: We call to our cat, it turns away, and some of us might be left wondering why we didn’t get a dog. But your cat may be listening after all. More than that, it cares more than you may think.
A study by French researchers that was published last month in the journal Animal Cognition found that not only do cats react to what scientists call cat-directed speech — a high-pitched voice similar to how we talk to babies — they react to who is doing the talking.
“We found that when cats heard their owners using a high-pitched voice, they reacted more than when they heard their owner speaking normally to another human adult,” said Charlotte de Mouzon, an author of the study and cat behavior expert at the Université Paris Nanterre. “But what was very surprising in our results was that it actually didn’t work when it came from a stranger’s voice.”
Unlike with dogs, cat behavior is difficult to study, which is part of why humans understand them less. Cats are often so stressed by being in a lab that meaningful behavioral observations become impossible. And forget about trying to get a cat to sit still for an M.R.I. scan to study its brain function.
So the researchers for the latest study went to the cats’ homes and played recordings of different types of speech and different speakers. At first, Dr. de Mouzon and her team were worried that the cats weren’t reacting at all. But then they studied film recordings of the encounters. “Their reactions were very subtle,” Dr. de Mouzon said. “It could be just moving an ear or turning the head towards the speaker or even freezing what they were doing.”
.jpg)
