Your cat knows you're talking to him, but does he understand?

A woman works from home in the presence of her cat. Eva Plevier (Reuters)

Maria puts the key in the lock of her door.

She's had a long day at work, but she's finally home.

As usual, her cat receives her affectionately in the hallway.

Other days, the first thing Maria would do when she arrived is pet her pet, but this time she is so tired that she plops down on the sofa without even taking off her coat.

Then her cat stares at her and says:

—Meow.

To which Maria answers with a higher voice, as if she were addressing a baby:

"What's up

?

Have you missed me?

Of course, of course, how can you not miss me if you've been alone all day.

Come here, I'll pamper you."

A typical example of human-cat communication has occurred.

For one, Maria has spoken in a very different style than she would use with an adult human.

Her tone was sharper and more variable, her expressions shorter and more repetitive, she spoke slowly and she asked questions that she instantly answered herself.

On the other hand, the cat has said meow.

Just as dogs bark both at humans and at other dogs, cats meow practically only at humans, rarely using this vocalization with their own species.

Humans and cats adapt our communication style by interacting with each other, but is it good for anything?

Does Maria understand her cat's meows?

Does she know how to recognize Leia when Maria speaks to her?

Only in recent years, science is trying to answer these questions.

The cat meows practically only to humans, they rarely use this vocalization with their own species

Around 600 million cats live with humans around the world.

These cats are very popular pets, not only for practical reasons, but also for their ability to communicate with humans and form bonds.

In fact, cats have the most complex vocal repertoire of all carnivores.

Although there are probably more, science has documented that they use up to 21 different vocalizations in their interactions.

Among all, the most popular to communicate with us is the meow.

Wild cats only meow occasionally to mark territory or attract a mate, but domestic cats do so constantly when interacting with humans.

For this reason, it is thought that the meowing may be a product of the domestication and socialization of cats with humans.

It is possible that cats capable of meowing were able to better capture our attention, thus achieving certain advantages.

Now, this does not mean that humans know how to interpret meows well.

More information:

Do animals understand each other when they communicate as people understand each other?

In 2020, a study from the University of Milan wanted to find out if we could differentiate audio meows produced by cats in three different situations: waiting for food, being brushed or isolated in an unknown environment.

The study participants were pretty bad at the task: eating was the only context in which they were slightly more correct than would be expected by chance.

This can lead us to get frustrated when a cat meows insistently and the context doesn't help us identify the cause.

However, the good news is that when the participant was the owner of the cat, he was much more correct, so having experience with our pet can help us understand them better.

In turn, women did not do as badly as men, which is consistent with previous evidence.

It has been seen that they tend to be more perceptive when it comes to interpreting emotions, both in humans and in other animals.

A year earlier, another study had already shown that humans are able to identify different moods by looking at the facial expressions of cats, and that women are better at it than men.

What do you think?

What is being quite a challenge for science is to investigate what goes through the heads of cats when we communicate with them, because these animals do not like the laboratory at all.

As soon as they leave their comfort zone, they become so stressed that any study carried out under these conditions is practically invalidated.

One solution is to conduct the experiments in the houses where the cats live, so that they feel in a safe environment and are relaxed.

Using this procedure, a recently published study has set out to investigate whether cats know how to identify when we speak to them.

The researchers placed speakers in the room where the cat was and played audio of different people saying phrases like “Do you want to play?”

"How are you?"

"Bye!"

Sometimes these phrases carried the typical intonation we use when addressing a pet and other times they carried the intonation we use among adult humans.

They recorded the reaction of the cats to be able to analyze it in detail, noting any movement, from the rotation of the ears to the change of gaze.

Thus, they demonstrated that cats differentiate between the two types of intonation and know when they are addressed, but only if it is their owner who is speaking.

These results are in line with those provided by another study carried out twenty years earlier.

In this case, several people had to try to interact with an unknown cat.

They discovered that the fact that the participant spoke to the cat did not help it get closer to them, it was even counterproductive if it was a boy and used a lot of imperatives.

The only factor that had a clear effect on the time the animal spent with the subject was how much or how little the subject liked cats.

Although apparently all humans behaved the same, the cat could identify by the subtleties of body language those who looked kindly on him.

The results of these investigations must be taken with a grain of salt, since science is only taking its first steps in the study of communication between cats and humans.

Without going any further, in the previous experiment only one cat participated, and extrapolating the behavior of an individual to an entire species is rash.

Similarly, only 16 cats reacted to the recordings in their homes. Many more studies are needed before we can draw more definitive conclusions about the understanding between cats and humans.

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