The Null Device

Our Furry Masters: A psychology researcher at Cornell University has found that domestic cats' meows have evolved to hook into human perception, and better communicate with (or manipulate) humans, over the millennia of domestication. Recordings of the calls of wild desert cats (believed to be closely related to domestic cats' wild ancestors) were found by test subjects to be harsher and less pleasant-sounding than those of domestic cats.
"I think cats have evolved to become better at managing and manipulating people."

(via Techdirt)

There are 4 comments on "":

Posted by: np http://www.neuroprosthesis.org Wed May 15 16:20:00 2002

We would like to invite you again to visit our site if you are interested in related science news and some background info. Cats are our exceptional favorites :-)

<b><a href="http://www.neuroprosthesis.org/blogger.html">NeuroProsthesis News</A></b>

Posted by: acb http://dev.null.org Wed May 15 16:22:28 2002

You've mentioned your site about three times in these comments. Don't you think you're overdoing it a bit?

Posted by: np http://www.neuroprosthesis.org Thu May 16 11:44:03 2002

Maybe, thanks for reminding. Actually, I think it was only two times.

These remarks came after different types of very closely related science news articles, but they all attract different visitors. This last, the catspeak, was the lightest one. Thanks for hosting and it was interesting to explore the traffic among blogs. Frankly, we are not extremely impressed with science and technology related discussions on MetaFilter.

Posted by: okiba http://okiba75.net Thu May 16 13:33:34 2002

Our cat has a wide range of meows -- and he is quite the master of manipulation...

As the adage goes -- dogs have owners, cats have staff.