When science finds out what we know already

Study: our cats understand us but they don’t really care

A recent study has confirmed what cat owners have long known: Cats understand when spoken to but they choose to ignore most of what people say.

We were intrigued enough by the headline to look up the the scientific paper to see if it supported the assertion.

And.. It does. Sort of.

Essentially cat boffins played some tapes to a few moggies of their owners voice calling their name and other voices, the cats would react slightly to voices they recognised but not come. Big surprise there.

Vocal recognition of owners by domestic cats (Felis catus)

Atsuko Saito , Kazutaka Shinozuka
Domestic cats have had a 10,000-year history of cohabitation with humans and seem to have the ability to communicate with humans. However, this has not been widely examined. We studied 20 domestic cats to investigate whether they could recognize their owners by using voices that called out the subjects’ names, with a habituation–dishabituation method. While the owner was out of the cat’s sight, we played three different strangers’ voices serially, followed by the owner’s voice. We recorded the cat’s reactions to the voices and categorized them into six behavioral categories. In addition, ten naive raters rated the cats’ response magnitudes. The cats responded to human voices not by communicative behavior (vocalization and tail movement), but by orienting behavior (ear movement and head movement). This tendency did not change even when they were called by their owners. Of the 20 cats, 15 demonstrated a lower response magnitude to the third voice than to the first voice. These habituated cats showed a significant rebound in response to the subsequent presentation of their owners’ voices. This result indicates that cats are able to use vocal cues alone to distinguish between humans.
Source: springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10071-013-0620-4

Source: twitter.com/eliistender10