Cats make a difference when their owner talks to them

A small study has found that cats they can change their behavior when they hear their owner’s voice speaking in a tone directed at them but not when directed at another person.

This distinction cannot be made with the voice of a stranger. The study, conducted with 16 cats and published in the journal ‘AnimalCognition‘, adds to the evidence that cats can form strong bonds with their owner.

Human tone is known to vary depending on whom the speech is addressed to, such as when speaking to children and dogs. Previous studies have shown that the tone of human speech changes when it is addressed to catsbut less is known about how they react.

Charlotte de Mouzon and her colleagues at the University of Paris Nanterre (France) investigated how 16 cats reacted to prerecorded voices from both their owner and a stranger when they said phrases in tones directed at the cat and adults.

The authors investigated three conditions, with the first condition changing the speaker’s voice from a stranger’s voice to that of the cat’s owner. The second and third conditions changed the tone used (directed at the cat or directed at the adult) by the voice of the cat’s owner or that of a stranger, respectively. The authors recorded and rated the intensity of the behavior of the cats that reacted to the audio, checking behaviors such as resting, ear movement, pupil dilation and tail movement, among others.

In the first condition, 10 of the 16 cats showed a decrease in behavioral intensity when listening to three audio clips of a stranger’s voice calling their name. However, when they heard their owner’s voice, the intensity of their behavior increased significantly again. The cats showed behaviors such as turning their ears towards the speakers, increasing movement around the room and dilating their pupils when hearing their owners’ voices. The authors suggest that the sudden spike in behavior indicates that the cats were able to discriminate their owner’s voice from that of a stranger.

In the second condition, 10 cats (8 of which were the same as in the first condition) decreased their behavior when listening to the adult-directed audio of their owner, but significantly increased their behavior when listening to the cat-directed tone of its owner. The change in intensity of behavior did not occur in the third condition when a stranger spoke in an adult-directed tone and in a cat-directed tone.

The authors observed that cats can distinguish when their owner speaks in a cat-directed tone compared to an adult-directed tone, but they did not react differently when a stranger changes tone.

The small sample size used in this study may not represent all cat behavior, but the authors propose that future research explore whether their results can be replicated in cats that are more socialized and used to interacting with strangers.

In any case, the researchers suggest that their findings add a new dimension to cat-human relationships, as cat communication may be based on the experience of the speaker’s voice, and they conclude that individual relationships are important for cats to understand. cats and humans form strong bonds.