Recently, my aunt suggested I slowly blink at her mercurial cat to get his attention. This is a cat that ignores you most of the day and might scratch at you during the times he deigns to lovingly rub against your leg. It turns out, she wasn’t wrong.
In a study published this week in the journal Nature, psychologists in the United Kingdom researched dozens of cats with healthy eyesight to test their reactions to slow blinks with two experiments. Researchers defined slow blinks as “a series of half-blinks followed by either a prolonged eye narrow or eye closure.”
The cats were much more likely to narrow their eyes at their owner when they slow blinked than when their owners didn’t interact with them. When strangers slowly blinked at a different set of cats, the fussy felines were more likely to approach them. Read more…
More about Animals, Cats, Science, and Animals
