The purring of domestic cats conveys more details about an animal’s character than meowing. Biologists reached this conclusion, with their study published in the journal Scientific Reports. The research indicated that purring serves as a more dependable acoustic indicator of a specific individual and is better suited for identifying it.
Scientists examined 276 meows from 14 cats and 557 purrs from 21 animals. The recordings were processed using acoustic analysis and discriminant modeling. Both types of vocalization allowed for the statistical differentiation of individual cats, though the precision varied.
According to the authors, animals were correctly recognized by their purring in 84.6% of instances. For meowing, this figure was only 63.2%. Calculations of the signals’ information capacity suggested that purring encodes about 4.47 bits of data, which is theoretically enough to distinguish up to 22 individuals in a group.
Meowing, as estimated by the team, contains around 2.65 bits of information—sufficient for the confident recognition of about six animals. The authors conclude that purring remains a consistent, individualized sound, relatively unchanging from one situation to the next and suitable for a trustworthy “vocal signature” of a particular cat, as reported by gazeta.spb.ru.
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