Overview
- A peer‑reviewed experiment published Nov. 12–13 tested 38 cat‑owner pairs in São Paulo and found cats vocalized far more when a person was present and able to access visible food.
- Researchers recorded 86 meows with a human in the room versus 20 when the cat was alone, though widely cited claims of a more than 16‑fold increase come from secondary reporting rather than the paper itself.
- The cats often combined meows with repeated gaze shifts between the person and the unreachable food, suggesting a multimodal attempt to get human help.
- Each one‑minute trial was filmed by video call in the cats’ homes, a practical setup that media described as easy for owners to reproduce as a casual 'self‑test'.
- The authors stress limits: the sample was small and deliberately recruited vocal, food‑motivated cats, so further replication with broader, representative samples is needed to judge how general the behavior is.