Cats Do Control Humans, Study Finds - Yahoo! News
Household cats use a special type of purring to get human owners to feed them.
"This meow is actually a purr mixed with a high-pitched cry....The study showed that humans find these mixed calls annoying and difficult to ignore."
Researchers say that "[t]he embedding of a cry within a call that we normally associate with contentment is quite a subtle means of eliciting a response. Solicitation purring is probably more acceptable to humans than overt meowing, which is likely to get cats ejected from the bedroom... [and that] the purr-cry may subtly take advantage of humans' sensitivity to cries they associate with nurturing [human] offspring."
"This meow is actually a purr mixed with a high-pitched cry....The study showed that humans find these mixed calls annoying and difficult to ignore."
Researchers say that "[t]he embedding of a cry within a call that we normally associate with contentment is quite a subtle means of eliciting a response. Solicitation purring is probably more acceptable to humans than overt meowing, which is likely to get cats ejected from the bedroom... [and that] the purr-cry may subtly take advantage of humans' sensitivity to cries they associate with nurturing [human] offspring."
posted at 3:05 PM
Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home