When I was.a kid, I "learned" from some authority (TV? book?) that cats and dogs could not recognize process two dimensional images, and that a TV was therefore just visual noise to them.
Except that we could all immediately tell if a Commodore Amiga demo was running at 25fps or 50fps and groups that'd have the frame rate drop from 50 to 25fps on some frames were "lame".
So I knew it was obviously false that humans couldn't discern when something was running at more than 24 fps.
Same when little Windows 95 utilities allowed to bump the framerate from 60 to 72 or 75 Hz. I remember those: they'd enhance the experience. Yet everybody was still telling me: "Why do you even bother, 60 Hz is enough, humans cannot discern more than 24 images per second".
Same for cats and dogs and the TV of course. Which I knew was wrong because on my Commodore Amiga I'd take a big circle, filled with a solid color, and make it bounce across the screen and watch my cats' reactions.
People can be really extremely dumb, even in the face of evidence.
Even then, a two bladed shutter was used to flash the image on the screen twice for each frame, and more modern projectors used a three-bladed shutter to reduce flicker.
Basically that: It's a repeated and extremely common misunderstanding of the actual claim, that 24fps is right about the threshold between interpreting a series of images as motion instead of a series of images.
A lot of people assume that once you see it as motion, there's nothing more that can be gained.
People mostly couldn't verify anything.
May I inquire: How do we verify things today that we did not back then?
Approximately nobody had access to anything before it.
However, there's another important factor, which is that if you move an edge accross your visual field and sample at a certain frequency, depending on the speed of the edge, you might get a stroboscope-like effect and see multiple parallel edges. This is something a lot of people notice in 60 Hz computer rendered video, or when moving quickly under a lamp flickering at the mains frequency, because every frame is sharp without any motion blur. By contrast, you can run video filmed at an exposure time similar to the frame time at lower frame rates and it'll look fine, because the motion blur removes that stroboscope-like appearance.
Importantly though, this is not us humans detecting 500 Hz flicker itself, quite the opposite -- the reason the artifact is visible is that our retina is not sensitive to fast motion, it integrates over a period of time in which the edge appears to be in multiple locations.
The 60/72/75/... Hz (some screens could display 85 or even 90 Hz) of the Windows 95 epoch was the refresh rate of the CRT tube: the higher, the less flicker. Once you tried 75 Hz, you clearly didn't want to go back to 60 Hz (or at least, that was my experience).
Do you find normal movies in the theater difficult to watch because of your "high frame rate?" If I could see gaps in 144 Hz, then it seems (totally imagining with math), like it would be the equivalent of a 4 Hz frame rate for "normal" eyesight. 24 Hz / 144 Hz ( 24 Hz normal movie) = 4 Hz. 4 Hz looks super choppy bad. Seems like it would turn into the Flash trying to watch a human movie.
Course, I asked colorblind people about colorblindness, and it was totally crazy all the different colorblindness types they talked about. So could be bad mental picture.
Many people have noted my particularly small head. But my reaction time is average. So time perception and reaction time may not be related.
Like with colorblindness/synesthesia, I'm constantly surprised by all these different people I talk to who experience everything differently. Would not have guessed it would cause reverse motion scrolling. The eye exams and charts always made it sound like 20/20 at "normal speed" was correct, and the only change from correct was bad. Sounds like y'all just look at something different.
This means anything that adds or remove frames is going to quickly cause the motion to look unnatural or at least different from the original.
A ton of "science" taught to kids through seemingly legitimate channels is in fact just the off the cuff intuitions of some thoroughly average adult, and adults on average tend to be staggeringly uninformed on most topics.
EDIT: And even more so for history.
On Instagram we received hundreds of pics submitted by viewers of their cats watching Kitten TV, it became a meme.
This is the problem with this kind of thing so often, people observe something and an explanation that sounds completely logical gets spread around.
Not sure about dogs, but cats definitely could see a plain 60Hz CRT display... atleast some of them anyway.
For example, this spectral comparison implies there is a rather large difference in the color experience of watching CRT vs LCD. Very pronounced and spikey red component vs smooth gaussians. Canines are notorious for issues with red colors.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Alireza-Shahsafi/public...
That said, it's really more of an art project than anything to do with science as the article makes it clear the rats were trained to push buttons to get sugar, the selfies were just artistic flourish to make a (fairly overt) point.
according to the article, this was just to get them hooked at first, but they kept doing it later:
> After the rats were trained to push the level for sugar, Lignier changed the experiment's parameters. Sometimes taking a picture would yield a piece of sugar, and sometimes would not.
> Nevertheless, the rats kept on jamming the button, taking dozens of selfies. After awhile, he says they largely stopped bothering to eat the sugar, even when it came out.
In other words, it is quite possible that dogs see (poorly, without red) very much what we see, but the cognitive ability and then the "thinking" that happens after that, is very different.