It starts with one. You chuckle at one reel of a chonky cat doing silly cat stuff, and then, it consumes you. You become the connoisseur of cat videos, a defender of their stupidest schemes. Suddenly, you are locked in debate with your friends, arguing that cats do, in fact, form intimate relationships with their human companions, and they aren’t just using us as lifetime Airbnbs.
While we can’t exactly confirm that there is something behind those goofy feline eyes save death and destruction, there might be hope on the intimacy front, at least. New research has discovered that when you use your baby voice to address your cats, they know what you’re doing!
In this new research that puts a spin on the term ‘cat calling’, researchers studied 16 cats to determine whether they change their behaviour when their humans talk to them in their “cat-directed” tone. And if you’re still puzzled, we mean the squeaky tone you use in front of your or your friend’s excruciatingly cute pet.
We’ve known that humans use different tones based on when they’re talking to other adults or when they’re talking to infants and dogs. But significantly less is understood about how our feline friends react to the same.
So when the scientists played pre-recorded audio clips of their humans using their cat-directed voices, most of them began to get excited. Their ears would perk towards the speakers, pupils would dilate, and they would start to pace around the room.
This is a stark contrast from when the researchers played clips of the owners talking in their usual “adult-directed” voices, where the cats would actually begin to reduce displaying these aforementioned behaviour patterns. Additionally, when similar clips of a stranger making the transition from adult-directed to cat-directed voice was played, the cats barely noticed.
This means that cats can distinguish that their owners are changing their voices and can somehow empathise with us! Furthermore, the fact that they barely reciprocated to the stranger calling out means they form bonds with their owners more than other humans.
However, the small sample size of the experiment also means that we cannot definitively tell whether this is a shared trait among all cats, and that they won’t immediately sell us out to the lowest bidder. But these findings do add a new dimension to cat-human relationships and how cat communication has the potential to rely on them learning their owner’s voice and mannerisms.
This research was published in Animal Cognition and can be accessed here.
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