Rachael Funnell writes This Is The Best Way to Get A Cat’s Attention According to Science:
With the help of 18 domestic cats (8 females, 10 males) with a job history of at least three years in a cat café, experimenters tried four different approaches to getting a cat’s attention: using visual cues, using vocal cues, using both, or using neither (as the control).
This was far from the team’s first rodeo in exploring cat behavior around humans, which meant they approached the experiment with some idea as to what might happen.
“Knowing that cats have developed specific vocalizations for interacting with humans, we hypothesized that they would be keener to approach a human engaging in vocal communication compared to visual communication,” they explained. However, cats aren’t famous for their cooperation.
The results of the different experimental conditions revealed that actually, cats interacted significantly faster in response to visual and bimodal (both visual and vocal) communication compared to vocal cues alone. Interestingly it also showed that failing to acknowledge a cat completely may stress them out, as the most tail wagging was observed in the control condition where the experimenter ignored the cat.
It seems that if you want to catch the attention of a cat on the street, you’ve really got to go for it.
“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,” concluded the authors. “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.”
The study is published in the journal Animals.