Studies show most of us are pretty bad at interpreting our cats’ moods. A research team in Australia wants to change that.
Cats are constantly telling us how they feel, but many of us aren’t listening.
We’re not talking about chirping, trilling and meowing, although those are some of the ways our cats try to communicate with us.
While they might seem protective of their own thoughts and feelings, cats are actually transparent, and they can’t lie.* Their tails, ears, whiskers, facial expressions and body language all broadcast a cat’s mood.
The question is, are we picking up that broadcast?
In The Conversation, the University of Adelaide’s Julia Henning introduces us to a quiz she designed to answer that question, and invites us to take it.
The goal: to correctly assess each cat’s mood. What I liked most was that we’re asked to evaluate videos — clear, well-lit high resolution clips — instead of the low resolution stills that are often used for quizzes like this.
Sir Talks-a-lot
Henning has been studying the human-cat communication issue because when we misread cats, there’s a good chance we’re stressing them out. Henning and her team published the results of a study in September in which 368 participants from Australia were asked to evaluate a series of clips human-feline interaction.
It turns out they didn’t do so well at reading the signs that a cat is agitated, stressed or doesn’t want to play.
“For videos of cats who weren’t playing and were showing subtle negative cues (such as sudden tension in the body or avoiding touch), participants only recognised the negative cues about as well as chance (48.7%),” the authors of the study wrote.
Even when study participants correctly read a cat’s ears, tail, whiskers and body language, some of them indicated they’d do things that would unknowingly make a cat more agitated and stressed. A classic example is trying to pet a cat’s belly and misinterpreting their derpy way of trying to block you as a playful gesture.
Did you know? Approximately 96% of Buddy’s communication is related to yums.
In the paper, which was published in Frontiers in Ethology, Henning and her colleagues lay out the case for making sure we — the people who take care of cats — are sensitive to what our little buddies are feeling.
It’s not just about strengthening the bond, although that’s an important part. It’s about reducing stress and miscommunication, and increasing quality of life.
Cats are incredibly sensitive to our actions and moods because we are the most important living beings in their lives. We feed and house them, and we’re their pals. If we’re constantly subjecting them to play they don’t like or overstimulating them, they get stressed, and stressed cats can become depressed, sick or resentful cats.
If we want to make sure our buddies live their best lives, we have to understand what they’re trying to tell us.
(*) Except when it comes to food. When food is involved, these innocent, cute little furry creatures become master manipulators and can convince anyone they’re starving.
Note: The first version of this story linked to the study page twice when the first link should have pointed to the quiz. It’s fixed now, and email subscribers can follow the link through this version of the story. Apologies for the error.
Cats and dogs communicate primarily by scent, touch and body language, but human efforts to understand them have focused exclusively on meows and barks. If we want to truly understand our non-human friends, we need to take an approach that considers the other ways animals “talk” to each other.
A few years ago when MeowTalk made a minor splash in the startup world, I was pretty bullish on its potential to help us understand our cats better.
Sure, the app had an unhelpful habit of attributing improbably loving declarations to Buddy, but I thought it would follow the trajectory of other machine learning models and drastically improve as it accumulated more data.
More users meant the app would record and analyze more meows, chirps and trills, meaning it was just a matter of time before the AI would be able to distinguish between an “I want attention!” meow and a “My bowl is dangerously close to empty!” meow.
Obviously that didn’t happen, and what I personally didn’t take into account back then — and should have, given how obvious it is in retrospect — is that cats don’t just communicate via vocalizations.
In fact, cats don’t normally incorporate vocalizations into communication at all. Pet kitties do it entirely for our benefit because they know we’re generally awful at interpreting body language and we are completely useless when it comes to olfactory information.
It’s actually amazing when you really think about how much of the heavy lifting cats do in our efforts to communicate with each other. They recognize we can’t communicate the way they do naturally, so they try to relate to us on our terms. In return, we meet them less than halfway.
No wonder Buddy sometimes looks frustrated as he meows at me, as if I’m the biggest moron in the world for not understanding the very obvious thing he’s trying to tell me.
“Human, how can you not understand the simple feeling of innerer schweinehund I’m trying to convey here? The cringe is killing me!”
Now the Chinese tech giant Baidu is throwing its hat into the ring after filing a patent in China for an AI system that uses machine learning to decode animal communication and “translate” it to human language.
Machines are designed to process things from a human viewpoint according to human logic, so if Baidu wants to succeed where MeowTalk has not, its engineers will need to take a thoughtful approach with the help of animal behavior experts.
This is a hard problem that encompasses animal cognition, neuroscience, linguistics, biology, biochemistry and even philosophy. If they approach this strictly as a tech challenge, they’ll set themselves up for failure.
Without the information and context clues provided by tails, whiskers, facial expressions, posture, eye dilation, heart rate, pheromones and even fur, an AI system is only getting a fraction of the information cats are trying to convey.
Trying to glean meaning from that is like trying to read a book in which only every fourth or fifth letter is legible. There’s just too much missing information.
Even if we can train machines to analyze sound visual, tactile and olfactory information, it may not be possible to truly translate what our cats are saying to us. We may have to settle for approximations. We’ve only begun to guess at how the world is interpreted differently among human beings thanks to things like qualia and neurodivergence, and the way cats and dogs see the world is undoubtedly more strange to us than the way a neurodivergent person might make sense of reality.
“He grimaced. He had drawn a greedy old character, a tough old male whose mind was full of slobbering thoughts of food, veritable oceans full of half-spoiled fish. Father Moontree had once said that he burped cod liver oil for weeks after drawing that particular glutton, so strongly had the telepathic image of fish impressed itself upon his mind. Yet the glutton was a glutton for danger as well as for fish. He had killed sixty-three Dragons, more than any other Partner in the service, and was quite literally worth his weight in gold.” – Cordwainer Smith, The Game of Rat and Dragon
An animal’s interpretation of reality may be so psychologically alien that most of its communication may be apples to oranges at best. Which is why I always loved Cordwainer Smith’s description of the feline mind as experienced via a technology that allows humans with special talents to share thoughts with cats in his classic short story, The Game of Rat and Dragon.
In the story, humans are a starfaring civilization and encounter a threat in the void between stars that people don’t have the reaction speed to deal with. Cats, however, are fast and swift enough, and with a neural bridge device, teams of humans paired with cats are able to keep passengers safe on interstellar journeys.
The narrator, who is one of the few people with an affinity for teaming up with felines, hopes he’ll be paired with one of his two favorite cats for his latest mission, but instead he’s assigned to partner with an old glutton of a tomcat whose mind was dominated by “slobbering thoughts of food, veritable oceans of half-spoiled fish.”
The narrator wryly notes that the last time one of his colleagues was paired with that particular cat, his burps tasted of fish for weeks afterward. But the cat in question, despite being obsessed with fish, is a badass at killing “dragons,” the human nickname for the bizarre entities that attack human ships in space. (The software that allows felines and humans to link thoughts also portrays the “dragons” as rodents in the minds of the cats, stimulating their ancient predatory drive so they’ll attack instantly when they see the enemy.)
We can’t know for sure if Smith’s interpretation of the feline mind is accurate, but another part rang true when he wrote that cat thoughts were all about the moment, filled with sentiments of warmth and affection, while they rapidly lost interest in thoughts about human concerns, dismissing them “as so much rubbish.”
If the mind of a cat is that relatable, we’ll be incredibly lucky. But in reality we’re dealing with animals who evolved in drastically different ecological niches, with different priorities, motivations, and ways of looking at the world — literally and figuratively.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to understand our furry friends. Research has yielded interesting information about the way animals like whales and elephants communicate, and AI is at its best when it augments human creativity and curiosity instead of trying to replace it.
Even if we don’t end up with a way to glean 1:1 translations, the prospect of improving our understanding of animal minds is tantalizing enough. We just need to make sure we’re listening to everything they’re saying, not just the meows.
Once again, we’ve underestimated cats. There’s so much more to the ways in which they communicate than we realize.
We know cats use non-verbal signals to communicate with each other, but recent research suggests we may just be scratching the surface, glimpsing only a portion of the information that passes between our furry friends.
Cats “talk” to each other by the way they position their tails, whiskers and ears, in addition to their overall body language.
It turns out there’s more. A group of interdisciplinary scientists from universities in Kansas, Arkansas and Haifa, Israel, found cats also employ specific facial expressions, and rapidly mirror each other’s expressions during play time to signal they’ve got good intentions and aren’t going to hurt each other.
From there, the coders and mathematicians on the team created an algorithm to record and sort the facial expressions the cafe cats used, employing CatFACS (Cat Facial Action Coding System) to associate each expression with its meaning.
The problem is, we humans are terrible at reading them. Even veterinarians trained in CatFACS still struggle to get it right, but happily this is precisely the sort of task algorithmic AI excels at. Like facial recognition software, a well-trained machine learning algorithm can recognize faces and record them more accurately and much faster than any person could.
In a column praising the facial expressions study, evolutionary biologist and Jane Goodall Foundation ethics board member Mark Bekoff said it’s the kind of labor-intensive work that truly advances our understanding of the ways animals communicate.
For cats and their human caretakers, Bekoff notes, it could help us reduce inter-species misunderstandings and make it easier to read our cat’s emotions, so we know when they’re not feeling well or need something.
“There are no substitutes for doing what’s needed to learn about the nitty-gritty details of how animals communicate with one another in different contexts,” Bekoff wrote. “This study of play opens the door for more widespread comparative research focusing on how animals talk to one another.”
“Do I look happy, human?” Credit: Milan Nykodym/Wikimedia Commons
We also know adult cats very rarely meow to each other, and the meow is reserved for cat-to-human communication. Imagine the frustration our little friends must feel when they have so much to tell us, but the only thing we understand are vocalizations — meows, chirps and trills — that can convey only basic ideas at best.
I have to admit, as cute as Buddy was as a kitten, I don’t miss the “war on sleep” phase.
A woman who adopted a kitten set up a camera to film what happens while she sleeps, like the main characters of the surprisingly scary 2007 film Paranormal Activity, except instead of doors opening and slamming shut by themselves, TVs turning on randomly and other freaky ghost stuff, she got footage of her new kitty gleefully waking her, mostly by belly-flopping on her snoozing human:
I know the experience all too well, and I’d imagine most people who have had a kitten know it too.
Buddy was absolutely ruthless as a baby! He’d scurry into a corner or hide under my desk, wait until I was snoring or just on the cusp of sleep, then climb up and screech the kitten equivalent of “Geronimo!” as he kamikaze’d himself onto my stomach.
Not a fun way to wake up. At all.
Bud would celebrate with delighted trilling, then pad back into the shadows to wait for his next opportunity. Oftentimes I’d hear squeaky little kitten chirps and imagine him laughing as he planned his next attack. He had entirely too much fun torturing me at night.
But fear not, Jenna, it gets better! I’m happy to report the Budster is much sweeter and more considerate as an adult cat. He still wakes me up, but often not to the level of fully awake, and instead of a cat landing a triple lutz, double axle on my stomach, I’m treated to super-soft fur against my face and the calming vibration of the little dude’s purrs.
It might take the better part of a year, but your kitten will chill out, adjust to your sleep schedule and realize a peaceful snooze is more satisfying than nighty games of Harass the Human.
The feline tendency to sit on your face and screech into your ear if your cat’s hungry or really wants your attention? Unfortunately that never goes away…
A new app aims to help us better understand and communicate with our cats.
A while back I wrote a post about MeowTalk, a new app that uses AI — and input from thousands of users sampling their cats’ vocalizations — to translate meows, trills and chirps for the benefit of those of us who don’t fluently speak cat or might need some clarity on what our furry friends are trying to say.
Now that I’ve finally had the opportunity to give MeowTalk a spin, it turns out Bud is a much more polite cat than I thought he was!
What I thought was an unenthusiastic “I acknowledge your presence, human” turned out to be “Nice to see you!” according to MeowTalk.
Buddy’s next meows were “Love me!” and “I love you!”, the app informed me. Weird. I thought he was complaining that I was only half-heartedly simulating prey with his wand toy while watching Jeopardy.
After Jeopardy I headed to the bathroom, which was the real test.
I intentionally closed the door before the little stinker could sneak in the bathroom with me, then held up the phone to capture his muted vocalization. I was sure Bud was saying “Open the door!” but the app told me Buddy was saying “I’m in love!”
Awww. What a good boy. How could I not let him in?
Once inside, Buddy began talking again as I knew he would. He’s a vocal cat.
“I’m looking for love!” the app translated as Bud pawed at the door, demanding to be let back out again. “My love, come find me!”
What was going on here?
Was Bud really professing his undying love for me, his human, or was he workshopping cheesy dialogue for a feline romance novel he’s been secretly working on?
Thankfully, MeowTalk allows you to correct translations if you think the app’s gotten them wrong. This looks more like it:
Translation from the original Buddinese language.
MeowTalk is in beta, and it can only get better as more users download the app, make profiles for their cats and make an effort to tag vocalizations with their correct meaning.
The app was authored by a software engineer who was part of the team that brought Amazon’s Alexa to life, and the algorithms that power it already show promise: When the app is listening (which it does only actively, after you have explicitly given it permission to do so), it does a great job of distinguishing cat vocalizations from background noise, human chatter, televisions and other incidental sounds. Even my fake meows were unable to fool it.
Each vocalization is sampled and saved to the history tab of your cat’s profile, so you can review and adjust the translations later. If you’ve got more than one cat you can make profiles for each one, and the app says it can tell which cat is talking. I wasn’t able to test this since the King does not allow interlopers in his kingdom, but given MeowTalk’s accuracy in distinguishing meows from every other sound — even with lots of background chatter — I have no reason to doubt it can sort vocalizations by cat.
In some respects it reminds me of Waze, the irreplaceable map and real-time route app famous for saving time and eliminating frustration. I was one of the first to download the app when it launched and found it useless, but when I tried it again a few months later, it steered me past traffic jams and got me to my destination with no fuss.
What was the difference? Few people were using it in those first few days, but as the user base expanded, so did its usefulness.
Like Waze, MeowTalk’s value is in its users, and the data it collects from us. The more cats it hears, the better it’ll become at translating them. If enough of us give it an honest shot, it just may turn out to be the feline equivalent of a universal translator.
And if it’s successful, its creator wants to make a standalone version as a collar, which would translate our cats’ vocalizations in real time. As far as I’m concerned, anything that can help us better understand our cats is a good thing.
Pain In The Bud 