“Multimodal Communication in the Human-Cat Relationship: A Pilot Study”, 2023-05-03 ():
In a current society marked by closer relationships between humans and their pet companions, most cat owners interact with their feline partners on a daily basis.
This study addresses whether, in an extraspecific interaction with humans, cats are sensitive to the communication channel used by their interlocutor. By examining 3 types of interactions—vocal, visual and bimodal (visual and vocal)—we found:
the modality of communication had a statistically-significant effect on the latency in time taken for cats to approach a human experimenter. Cats interacted statistically-significantly faster in response to visual and bimodal communication compared to vocal communication. In addition, cats displayed statistically-significantly more tail wagging when the experimenter engaged in no communication (control condition) compared to visual and bimodal communication.
Taken together, our results suggest that cats display a marked preference for both visual and bimodal cues addressed by non-familiar humans compared to vocal cues only. Our findings offer further evidence for the emergence of human-compatible socio-cognitive skills in cats that favour their adaptation to a human-driven niche.
Across all species, communication implies that an emitter sends signals to a receiver, through one or more channels. Cats can integrate visual and auditory signals sent by humans and modulate their behavior according to the valence of the emotion perceived. However, the specific patterns and channels governing cat-to-human communication are poorly understood. This study addresses whether, in an extraspecific interaction, cats are sensitive to the communication channel used by their human interlocutor. We examined 3 types of interactions—vocal, visual, and bimodal—by coding video clips of 12 cats living in cat cafés. In a fourth (control) condition, the human interlocutor refrained from emitting any communication signal. We found that the modality of communication had a statistically-significant effect on the latency in the time taken for cats to approach the human experimenter. Cats interacted statistically-significantly faster to visual and bimodal communication compared to the “no communication” pattern, as well as to vocal communication. In addition, communication modality had a statistically-significant effect on tail-wagging behavior. Cats displayed statistically-significantly more tail wagging when the experimenter engaged in no communication (control condition) compared to visual and bimodal communication modes, indicating that they were less comfortable in this control condition. Cats also displayed more tail wagging in response to vocal communication compared to the bimodal communication. Overall, our data suggest that cats display a marked preference for both visual and bimodal cues addressed by non-familiar humans compared to vocal cues only. Results arising from the present study may serve as a basis for practical recommendations to navigate the codes of human-cat interactions.
[Keywords: companion cats, Felis catus, social cognition, human-cat interaction, interspecific communication, multimodal communication]
“When we communicate with them, what is more important to them? Is it the visual cues or the vocal cues? That was the starting question of our research”, de Mouzon told Gizmodo.
They recruited help from 12 cats living at a cat cafe. The experimenter (de Mouzon herself) first got the cats used to her presence. Then she put them through different scenarios. The cats would enter a room and then de Mouzon interacted with them in one of 4 ways: She called out to them but made no gestures toward them otherwise, like extending out her hand; she gestured toward them but didn’t vocalize; she both vocalized and gestured toward them; and, in the fourth, control condition, she did neither.
The cats approached de Mouzon the fastest when she used both vocal and visual cues to catcall them, compared to the control condition—a finding that wasn’t too unexpected. But the team was surprised by the fact that the cats responded quicker to the visual cues alone than they did to the vocal cues. De Mouzon points out that owners routinely love to adopt a “cat talk voice” with their pets, so they figured that cafe cats would respond better to vocalizations. They now theorize that this preference might be different for cats interacting with human strangers than it would be for their owners.
“It shows that it’s not the same thing. It’s not the same for a cat to communicate with their owner as it is to communicate with an unfamiliar human”, she said. “It’s nice to have the results that you expect. But sometimes it’s also nice to have results that you don’t expect, because it makes you think and form new hypotheses that try to get at what’s really going on.”
Another intriguing finding was that the cats tended to wag their tails more often in the vocal cue scenario and the most in the control scenario, when they were being fully ignored. Dogs might wag their tails out of happiness, but it’s usually the opposite for cats—an indicator of stress or discomfort.
The tail wagging is more evidence that cats are more comfortable with visual or combined cues from human strangers, de Mouzon says. And they might be especially stressed when ignored because of the incongruity of the situation. She notes that the cats were placed in a room where they interacted with a human who previously played with them but was now completely shutting them out. Much like humans, cats might also feel discomfort when they can’t easily read the intentions of someone else in a room.
De Mouzon plans to keep diving deep into the nuances of cat-human conversation. She and others are currently working on a study of how owners respond to visual and vocal cues from their cats (notably, cats only really meow to humans and not to each other). She also hopes to replicate this study with house cats to confirm her suspicions about their different communication styles.
A separate key lesson learned from this research is that French people seem to have their own unique way of getting cats to notice them. The paper details de Mouzon using “a sort of ‘pff pff’ sound” as her vocal cue, which is apparently widely used by people in France to call cats. When she demonstrated the gesture over Zoom, it sounded like a “kissy” sound, at least to this reporter’s ear. And importantly, it was subtly distinct from the “pspsps” sound that’s common among English-speakers trying to attract a cat.