Posted for Fiona Tomkinson, British Science Association Media Fellow

It finally has been confirmed that we are controlled by our cats. Well, at least to the extent that they get their dinner.

Researchers from the University of Sussex have found that cats give out a mixed signal of urgent cries or meowing subtly embedded within a characteristic purr. This manipulative mewing is just too annoyingly difficult to ignore.

“The embedding of a cry within a call that we normally associate with contentment is quite a subtle means of eliciting a response,” says Karen McComb of the University of Sussex (press release). “Solicitation purring is probably more acceptable to humans than overt meowing, which is likely to get cats ejected from the bedroom.”

The research was inspired by Karen’s own want to understand how her cat Pepo (BBC) was just as reliable as a daily wake up call. Her own detective work led her to believe she was not alone: “After a little bit of investigation, I discovered that there are other cat owners who are similarly bombarded early in the morning,” says McComb.

Playing recordings of cats to human volunteers even revealed that non-cat owners reacted similarly to cat-lovers, finding the mixed signal more urgent and less pleasing compared with a genuine low-frequency purr of content.

“The voiced peak that we measured in our study in fact occurs at comparable frequencies to the fundamental frequency of a human infant’s cry,” the researchers note in their Current Biology report.

Solicitation purrs unusually peaked in the 220 to 520 hertz frequency range. Babies’ cries have a similar frequency range, 300 to 600 hertz, McComb says (New Scientist).

So cats seem capable of bringing out the nurturing instinct in us all.

Image: By fofurasfelinas from Flickr under Creative Commons