What Do Cats See?

I think there is one fundamental flaw with simulating color seen by non humans or dichromat humans. I've seen this in all computer based simulators. They simply change the weight of some colors relatively to others.

But a dichromat with say, missing L cones will not simply mix green and red, he will experience "green" totally differently than a trichromat. What a trichromat call green is the result of the stimulation of both M and L cones. We cannot see the pure spectral green. We cannot subtract the L cones contributions to what we experience, and its is quite important. The dichromat won't have any L cones contribution, the physiological stimuli won't be the same. He sees the actual spectral green. A color we have never seen and that we cannot imagine.

Now there is an experiment to do : put a full page of bright red and stare at it for minutes. It will start to become orange-ish. This is your L cones getting tired. Now swiftly switch to a bright green full page (prepare it so you can switch with a key press). You will experience a purer green that you ever experienced, because this green will have less red component to it as your L cones are tired (the effect will last mere seconds and quickly fade into normal green). If you were able to completely remove your L cones, you would see what the dichromat sees.

The trouble with "simulations" like these is they ignore cognitive post-processing - much like visualizations of what it's like to look through a compound eye portraying it as like looking at a wall of TV sets.

The human images and the cat images are not comparable because the human images represent a subjective impression, rather than a prediction from visual capabilities like the cat images. For example, the human images are crisp right out to near the edges. This is simply inaccurate - you can only read text within a FOV of about 6 degrees.

Scientists at Berkeley have actually recorded what cats see by scanning a vision pathway in their brain: http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/99legacy/10-15-1...

Here's a link to the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=piyY-UtyDZw

This seems to answer a question I asked myself just yesterday:

A neighbour's cat and my cat had a argument, no actual fighting - just lots of staring, yowling and that strange growling sound cats make. Nothing too questionable there, but then my cat did something rather strange - she started moving away by walking extremely slowly and I mean extremely slowly. I wondered what on earth she was up to but after reading this article I think it must have something to do with the fact that cats cannot seem to detect very slow motion. It appears that cats can move and position themselves in such a way that it may be undetectable (or nearly so) to another cat.

Of course there may be a completely different explanation, but I like this one.

This article was substandard for HN. No real mention or explanation was made of the reflective layer behind the retina, this is the special feature that gives cats what amounts to night vision, however it is at a cost of resolution. But hey, VGA night vision is better than a 4K pitch black image.

I have noticed that the cats I know are selectively short sighted. A rival cat from a neighbouring area or a fox can be spotted at considerable distance, however, a 'loved human' has to be relatively close to be acknowledged. This could have been rendered in the images, having it so that 'humans see humans' and 'cats see cats' in otherwise identical scenes.

Cat view - as in a few inches from the ground would not have been that hard to do - how difficult is it to take a photo these days rather than just download something random from the internets?

Furthermore, a cat's eyesight is augmented by an array of whiskers. These can be moved forward and back and are there to work out what something in close quarters is doing or shaped like. The cat has this area covered by the whiskers and has no need to be able to focus there even though we expect them to when we wave something in front of their noses.

Cats and other animals can see different spectrum, which is useful to their hunting. Noting that raptors can see infrared so actually 'see' the thermals they are flying in makes a whole lot of sense from an evolutionary standpoint.

Apropos of nothing, I find this a fascinating way of enhancing the link authority of a coupon site. Given algorithm changes at Google which punish sites for little original content, adding a blog like this to your coupon site ups content that allows you to organically rank higher.

Wouldn't the bokeh (~defocus kernel) shape be changed by the fact that cats have a differently shaped pupil?

Interesting nonetheless.

I think this misses one of the keys aspects of cat vision, movement perception. You'd need video for that. I imagine they see something like a glowing trail around moving stuff. Depeding on light conditions my cat might ignore food/toy until it moves.

If someone would do the same for eagles instead of cats, that would be awesome.

Try this instead:

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/10/cats-eye-view/

I'm routinely impressed that my cat uses a litter box with no problem that is almost completely dark at night. Not sure how she can see what she's doing, but it's cool!

Don't forget about the scientists who apparently took direct video output from a cat's brain - it looks like they have a facial pattern recognition similar to that of ours - what I mean is they look for the eyes/nose/mouth/etc and most likely see cat-like faces on other animals and humans (like we do when we think a dog is smiling). Interesting...

that's a blog just to get seo for a "deals" website. to flag or not to flag?

if I understand correctly they are short sighted so a good picture to add would be a macrophotography with a background to see where is their best vision in terms of depth of field no ?

I am not sure if I agree with the blurriness of cat-seen images. Human eyes are known to be pretty bad in terms of hardware. It is our brain that applies the wonderful image reconstruction that gives us the perception of crystal clear images. By scanning the neural pathways that transmit image data to a cat's brain, researchers have only establish the kind of signals that a cat's eye sends to its brain, not what a cat actually sees. It is entirely possible (and very likely) that the brain of cats sees something very different than what these images would have us believe.

I have seen my cat find a mouse in a camouflaged garden even when the mouse was not moving. Either this study is wrong or my cat is special.

I thought enhanced color vision developed for distinguishing plants. Primates eat lots of plants nad have been trichromatic. Cats and dogs are mostly meat eaters.

It's an interesting trend to run a blog that drives attention to your startup. The posts are becoming less and less relevant to the company too.

When a cat looks at a human he sees a servant.

Ran the link through Lynx and the results seemed more accurate:

[BED] [BED] [SCRATCHING POST] [BED] [POTTY] [BED] [BED] [BED]

Forget about cats,how can we be sure that all humans see the same colors?

How come all those cats are nearly 6ft tall?