Research overview: multimodal communication between cats and humans

Cat-human communication combines vocal, visual, and tactile channels, and research increasingly examines how these integrate. This overview surveys work on how cats coordinate meows, purrs, body postures, tail signals, slow blinks, and rubbing to convey intentions to people, and how humans interpret these combined signals. It discusses how multimodal signalling improves the reliability of communication and how owners and cats build shared conventions over time. It connects single-channel findings, such as the solicitation purr and tail-up, into an integrated picture. The topic frames the cat as an active, multichannel communicator and explains how the human-cat dialogue is constructed across several simultaneous modalities.