Dogs might wag their tails out of happiness, but it’s usually the opposite for cats-an indicator of stress or discomfort. But sometimes it’s also nice to have results that you don’t expect, because it makes you think and form new hypotheses that try to get at what’s really going on.”Īnother intriguing finding was that the cats tended to wag their tails more often in the vocal cue scenario and the most in the control scenario, when they were being fully ignored. “It’s nice to have the results that you expect. It’s not the same for a cat to communicate with their owner as it is to communicate with an unfamiliar human,” she said. They now theorize that this preference might be different for cats interacting with human strangers than it would be for their owners. De Mouzon points out that owners routinely love to adopt a “cat talk voice” with their pets, so they figured that cafe cats would respond better to vocalizations. But the team was surprised by the fact that the cats responded quicker to the visual cues alone than they did to the vocal cues. The cats approached de Mouzon the fastest when she used both vocal and visual cues to catcall them, compared to the control condition-a finding that wasn’t too unexpected. The cats would enter a room and then de Mouzon interacted with them in one of four ways: She called out to them but made no gestures toward them otherwise, like extending out her hand she gestured toward them but didn’t vocalize she both vocalized and gestured toward them and, in the fourth, control condition, she did neither. Then she put them through different scenarios. The experimenter (de Mouzon herself) first got the cats used to her presence. They recruited help from 12 cats living at a cat cafe. “When we communicate with them, what is more important to them? Is it the visual cues or the vocal cues? That was the starting question of our research,” de Mouzon told Gizmodo. We use everything from our voices to our facial expressions to our hands to get a point across to another human, and the same is true for cat-human conversations.įor this latest research, published Wednesday in the journal Animals, she wanted to get a better sense of how cats respond to our different modes of communication, both alone and when interwoven with each other. While this specificity might make it easier to test a hypothesis, it’s not really how communicating tends to work between any two animals.
Much of de Mouzon’s research has involved isolating and then studying a particular aspect of communication between cats and humans, such as vocal cues. Remembering Enterprise: The Test Shuttle That Never Flew to Space
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