SSS 2009-07-14

（单词翻译）

Anyone who’s ever had a cat knows how demanding they can be. Let me out, let me in, give me food, give me different food. The list goes on. But how do these clever kitties convince us to do their bidding? A study in the July 14 issue of Current Biology suggests it’s all in how they ask. Karen McComb of the University of Sussex started studying persuasive¹ cat calls after realizing that her own pet used a hybrid² between a purr and a cry to get her out of bed in the morning. McComb got recordings³ of other cat calls. And back in the lab, she found that humans thought purrs made by cats who were trying to solicit⁴ a snack were more urgent, and less pleasant, than those made when kitty was, say, relaxing on the sofa. Turns out that the "feed me" purr includes a high-frequency component⁵, absent from the contented⁶ purr, that makes people want to reach for a can opener just to make Fluffy⁷ stop. It’s obviously part of “Fluffy’s Master Plan (song) for World Domination.”