How A Cat Sees The World

Welcome back my fellow learners, today we are going to learn about how a cats eye works.

No one ever makes the statement about what the world would look like should you be a cat. Instead, we talk about a bird’s-eye view, and make use of fish-eye lenses to distort the way things look. However, we rarely think about how the Internet’s favourite animal sees the world the live in.

To begin with, a cats’ visual field is much wider than ours, spanning approximately 200 degrees instead of 180, and their visual acuity isn’t great. So, things people will see sharply, resolve at distances of 100-200 feet appear blurred to cats, which will see these objects at distances of 20 feet. That might not sound great, however, there’s always a trade-off.

Due to the various photoreceptors within a cats’ retina, they leave us standing when it comes to seeing clearly in dim light. Instead of the colour-resolving, and detail cone cells which are found in the center of a persons retinas, cats come with several more rod cells, these excel in dim light, and are responsible for a felines excellent night vision. The rod cells refresh quicker, this permits cats to see rapid movements, such as the rapidly shifting path a laser dot may trace.

Finally, cats see colours far differently than us, which is why cat versions of what we see are less vibrant than ours. Scientists originally though cats were dichromats, only able to see in two colour spectrum's, however, this is proved not to be the case. While a cats photoreceptors are sensitive to wavelengths found within the blue violet and green yellow ranges, it seems that they could also see some green also. In layman's terms, cats are nearly red and green colour blind, as are most of us.