People have noticed their pets reacting to the Oscar-winner “Flow” which features animated animals, making people wonder if their cat or dog recognizes themself on screen.
Whether it’s running up to the screen during the Academy Award-winning animated picture “Flow” or hiding during the latest episode of “Severance,” people have noticed their pets seem to react to what’s on television.
Animals interacting with screens is nothing new, said Rebecca Kleinberger, an assistant professor in humanics and voice technology and director of the INTERACT Animal Lab at Northeastern University. But just what is setting them off has yet to be discovered.
Animals interacting with screens dates as far back as the 1940s when psychologist and inventor B.F. Skinner trained pigeons to peck a screen to aim and fire missiles during World War II. Project Pigeon, as it was known, was never used by the government, but it demonstrated animals’ ability to interact with screens.
Since then, researchers have found animals will interact with screens in other ways. Kleinberger herself has found through studies that parrots will play tablet games and make video calls. So if you feel like your cat is watching reruns of “The Office” alongside you, you’re not wrong. But what exactly draws them to certain images is still unclear.
Research shows animals can sense moving images on screens, said Kleinberger. How they make sense of them depends on the species. Each one perceives colors and motion in a different way.
“They’re not going to see the world the same way (as us),” Kleinberger explained. “The pixels on our screen have been designed for human vision and they’re not going to work perfectly or as well for other animals.”
But, she added, some animals may still be able to make sense of the moving images even with the colors or with a skewed sense of how quickly the images are moving.
But is your cat actually responding to an animated cat on screen in “Flow” as many have hypothesized? That is a bit unclear.
“That does require actual studies and testing,” Kleinberger said. “An animal who’s exhibiting interest in a screen could be interested in it for many different reasons, including just from the fact that the human is interested in the screen. Maybe the screen contains some audio recorded with real animal sounds and they might react to this. The other element could be the way the movement appears on the screen, but there is little research about that.”
What attracts an animal to a certain TV show or movie may also depend on the species. The metrics for measuring engagement vary from species to species, Kleinberger said. Cats, for example, may not be as inclined to imitate animals on screen in a way that is obvious to a human observer, but may blink more which Kleinberger said shows they’re engaged
Meanwhile, Kleinberger has found parrots will mirror each other in video calls, indicating the social species can make sense of the animal on the screen and mimic it as they would another bird.
“Some animals might just be interested in just the light elements,” she said. “There’s color elements. Some of our recent parrots research, we examined different additional metrics around sense making, one of them (being) social mirroring. We know that parrots tend to imitate each other. … That’s basically the closest to understanding (we have).”
But this doesn’t mean pet owners can’t hypothesize why an animal is reacting to what they’re watching. Kleinberger said she noticed her two cats loved watching fish documentaries with her and figured they liked the motion of the fish on the screen.
The producer of “Flow” said the sounds may be why some owners have noticed their pets watching the film with them. They used real animal sounds in production. Similarly, some people notice distress in their dogs when watching the Apple TV series “Severance,” particularly scenes with certain sounds. The show’s sound mixer said they consistently use high-pitched, frenzied sounds that dogs might be hearing.
Just because your pet likes animated animal films or cat TV does not mean it’s good for them though. Kleinberger said that just like there isn’t enough research on why pets engage in a certain way, scientists also haven’t studied the harms or benefits of pets watching TV.
But that doesn’t mean them tuning in each night will harm them. Scientists still need to study more as to how and why pets interact with technology. This doesn’t mean a little television will harm them, but Kleinberger said owners should be aware of their pet’s reactions to different forms of tech, whether they’re spooked by the latest episode of “Severance” or an automatic feeder that lets people record messages for their pets.
“It’s always good to be mindful (and) to be really well acquainted with your own pet and understand what gets them stressed,” she said.