After collecting and analyzing 276 meows and 557 purrs from cats, researchers found that purrs are more useful for identifying individuals.
Cat vocalizations are mainly divided into 'meow' and 'purr.' A new study analyzing cat vocalizations found that 'purr' is more useful for identifying individual cats than 'meow.'
Meows encode less individual information than purrs and show greater variability in domestic than in wild cats | Scientific Reports
Cats' purrs reveal who's who better than their meows
Danilo Russo and his colleagues at the University of Naples Federico II focused on the fact that the 'meow' sound that cats make is rarely used between cats, but is often used to communicate with humans. They hypothesized that 'because meows are primarily used to communicate with humans, they may be easier to identify than purrs.'
To investigate whether there are individual differences in the sounds that cats make, we collected and analyzed 276 meows from 14 cats and 557 purrs from 21 cats.
The results showed that 'purr' sounds are more consistent than 'meow,' and that using purr as a criterion for categorizing individuals based on their sounds was more accurate: 63.2% accuracy for meow, and 84.6% accuracy for purr.
While meows tend to change depending on the situation, purrs are periodic and acoustically consistent, making it easier to identify them as coming from the same individual.
Russo and his colleagues speculated, 'Meowing is a relatively rare sound in cat-to-cat interactions, occurring in situations such as territorial disputes and mate solicitation, and is more common in young cats than in adult cats. However, in cat-human communication, it is often used during play and when asking for food. If purring is a natural sound, then meowing may be something that cats learn and adapt daily to attract human attention.'
Furthermore, when comparing domestic and wild cats, it was revealed that the meowing sounds of domestic cats are much more diverse than those of wild species.
Based on previous research showing that humans find the meows of domestic cats more pleasant than those of wild species, Russo and his colleagues hypothesized that domestication may have contributed to the evolution of meowing as a negotiation tool for survival in a human-centered world.
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