[Animals] Why do cats have 276 facial expressions?

[FNX Magokiler]

Domestic cats have 276 different facial expressions, a discovery that turns upside down the po[CENSORED]r belief that our felines are distant and don't like us.

In fact, it is likely that cats have developed these expressions thanks to us, a product of communication between felines and humans over 10,000 years of domestication.

"We have a very deep history with cats," and so there is a "growing interest" in how to decipher their emotions, says Brittany Florkiewicz, a comparative and evolutionary psychologist at Lyon College in Arkansas, who led a recent study on cats. the phenomenon published in the journal Science Direct.

Most previous research on facial signaling in cats has focused on cat-human interactions or assessing when a cat is in pain. The new study goes a step further and looks at how cats interact with each other.

And what better place to do it, says Florkiewicz, than a cat cafe? She and her colleague Lauren Scott, co-principal investigator in Florkiewicz's lab, spent 150 hours at the CatCafe Lounge in Los Angeles, California, USA, a nonprofit shelter where visitors can meet up to 30 cats to its possible adoption.

Their observations of 53 domestic short-haired cats revealed a wide variety of expressions (combining various eye, ear and lip movements) and that most of them were friendly, not aggressive.

 

 

Many felines would instantly recognize some of these expressions as friendly, such as ears and whiskers forward and eyes closed.

But others, like what researchers call the "game face," with the ears and whiskers forward and the mouth pulled back, don't have such an obvious meaning.

What's more, a lick on the lips might suggest that a cat is expecting a treat, but when combined with narrowed pupils and flattened ears, it's an unfriendly signal.

In general, whiskers are surprisingly revealing: happy cats almost always point their whiskers forward.

Is that a fake smile?
After hours in the cat cafe, Scott recorded 194 minutes of feline interactions, excluding non-communicative behaviors such as yawning or chewing.

Back in the lab, the team used a facial expression coding system called Facial Action Coding System, or CatFACS. Trained users can identify "even the most subtle of muscle movements," says Florekiwicz, and each of these movements, called an "action unit," is noted and assigned a number using a video program, ELAN. This allows users to create and edit a timeline of video sequences, he says, that can read expressions at the millisecond level.

 

https://www.nationalgeographic.es/animales/2023/11/gatos-domesticos-tienen-276-expresiones-faciales