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Comment by ogig | Hacker News Reader

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.

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The photos miss that, but it is mentioned in the text:

The increase in rods also enhances their “refresh rate”, so that they can pick up movements much faster (very helpful when dealing with small animals that change direction very quickly during a chase)

Also: Interestingly, this also means that humans have the ability to see very slowly moving objects at speeds 10 times slower than cats (that is to say that we can see very slow things move that would not appear to be moving to a cat)

Which made me wonder why sneaking up on a cat chameleon-style doesn't work better.

You're not moving slowly enough, and cats can hear really well.

And they can probably smell you unless you're down wind.

I often have to shake my cat's biscuits before she'll eat them, even if she has just been eating them.

Hasn't anyone invented a "jiggling cat food bowl" yet?

She'd probably try to kill it

It also misses another key aspect of cat perception - the keener senses of smell and hearing. They are less visually-centric than humans.

You could say the same about dogs and many other animals.

For the video simulations you're suggesting, they would have to slow everything down for us to see the difference, which would kind of break the realism they showed until then.

Also, the glowing trail thing would be a great way only for creatures like us humans, with slowly refreshing visual brains to handle information coming from faster refreshing retinas. But I have to imagine cats have their brains appropriately tuned for the refresh rate if their retinas and see movements clearly, with great detail in the time dimension.

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