Is Micio independent and lonely? You could be wrong because domestic cats need us and ask us for help through their eyes. Always considered more autonomous animals, house cats are abandoning their ancestral habits of wild cats but some of their important and new skills in establishing social relationships in the family are even underestimated by the owners themselves. Meowing, purring, blinking, narrowing and closing of the eyes among the main means of communication that cats dedicate to us to recognize us, ask us to eat and receive affection. To these signals, which generally those who own a cat are used to noticing, now another one is added: the look.
Cats seek our eyes to solve difficult tasks
. Micio understands who is reliable at home and chooses him in difficult moments by observing him and expecting attention which, if lacking, can put him in difficulty.
The curious discovery is the result of numerous tests made on a group of 75 domestic cats faced with delicacies that are difficult to reach. Kittens with attentive owners in following them with their eyes (without any kind of practical help) have managed to eat snacks more easily and quickly than cats who instead had distracted owners next to them. We read in the survey, published in Animal Cognition: "Cats share a living space in the house and communicate with humans demonstrating skills similar to that of dogs and children by adopting distinct attachment styles towards the various members of the family".
The results of this new test
challenge the popular idea that cats are independent and not people-oriented
. Instead they are able to recognize the attention of human beings and their signals. “They are in tune with their socio-cognitive environment, they notice the owner's behavior in times of difficulty and take into account the availability of human beings. The attention of the owner seems to serve as an important reinforcement for cat-human communication and to establish a strong bond between the two ”conclude the authors.
The survey lists previous findings in which many affective interactions between cats and their adoptive family have been demonstrated: the meow of domestic cats is more pleasant than that of African feral cats, and the purrs change based on some requests (for food , for example). Cats are also able to distinguish between the voice of the owner and that of a stranger and to recognize their name from similar sounding words, as well as to match a human face to the corresponding voice. Furthermore, a succession of half a blink of the cat's eyelash followed by a prolonged narrowing or closing of the eyes (
a real slow blink) seems to indicate positive emotions aimed at humans.
. It has also been shown that cats are able to read the emotional expression from the human face, the study reads.
Now it is known that house cats look at us and evaluate our level of attention towards them through the mutual gaze when they have difficult tasks to perform 'such as to identify hidden food or situations not familiar to them and therefore difficult to interpret, acting according to the informer's positive or negative emotional reactions, the survey reads.
