Cats Do Control Humans, Study Finds
LiveScience.com
livescience Staff
livescience.com – Mon Jul 13,
12:50 pm ET<!-- end .byline -->
If you've ever wondered who's in control, you or your cat, a new
study points to the obvious. It's your cat.
Household cats exercise this control with a certain type of
urgent-sounding, high-pitched meow, according to the findings.
This meow is actually a purr mixed with a high-pitched cry.
While people usually think of cat purring as a sign of happiness,
some
cats
make this purr-cry sound when they want to be fed. The study showed
that humans find these mixed calls annoying and difficult to
ignore.
"The embedding of a cry within a call that we normally associate
with contentment is quite a subtle means of eliciting a response,"
said Karen McComb of the University of
Sussex. "Solicitation purring is
probably more acceptable to humans than overt meowing, which is
likely to get cats ejected from the bedroom."
They know us
Previous research has shown similarities between cat cries and
human
infant cries.
McComb suggests that the purr-cry may subtly take advantage of
humans' sensitivity to cries they associate with nurturing
offspring. Also, including the cry within the purr could make the
sound "less harmonic and thus more difficult to habituate to," she
said.
McComb got the idea for the study from her experience with her
own cat, who would consistently wake her up in the mornings with a
very insistent purr. After speaking with other cat owners, she
learned that some of their cats also made the same type of call. As
a scientist who studies vocal communication in mammals, she decided
to investigate the manipulative meow.
Tough to test
Setting up the experiments wasn't easy. While the felines used
purr-cries around their
familiar
owners, they were not eager to make the same
cries in front of strangers. So McComb and her team trained cat
owners to record their pets' cries - capturing the sounds made by
cats when they were seeking food and when they were not. In all,
the team collected recordings from 10 different cats.
The researchers then played the cries back for 50 human
participants, not all of whom owned cats. They found that humans,
even if they had never had a cat themselves, judged the purrs
recorded while cats were actively seeking food - the purrs with an
embedded, high-pitched cry - as more urgent and less pleasant than
those made in other contexts.
When the team re-synthesised the recorded purrs to remove the
embedded cry, leaving all else unchanged, the human
subjects' urgency ratings for those calls decreased
significantly.
McComb said she thinks this cry occurs at a low level in cats'
normal purring, "but we think that cats learn to dramatically
exaggerate it when it proves effective in generating a response
from humans." In fact, not all cats use this form of purring at
all, she said, noting that it seems to most often develop in cats
that have a one-on-one relationship with their owners rather than
those living in large households, where their purrs might be
overlooked.
The results were published in the July 14 issue of the journal
Current Biology.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20090713/sc_livescience/catsdocontrolhumansstudyfinds
