How does cats see the world

Nickolay Lamm, an astrobiologist and artist who once worked for NASA, recently released a collection of images showing the world as seen through a cat’s eyes, with a blurry The image filter has a very similar filtering effect.

For objects 6 meters away, the cat cannot focus accurately, so they are all blurry
To compare the world seen through human eyes with the world seen through cats, Lem consulted Kerry L. Ketring of the Michigan Animal Eye Clinic and Dr. DJ Haeussler of the Animal Eye Institute. , and the ophthalmology team at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine, to examine his photos to make sure they were as accurate as possible.

Cat eyes have very low sensitivity to color and see the world in very grayscale.
Observing the appearance, the world in a cat’s eyes is not very different from the serious world of humans. However, their vision changes over time to suit different needs. Most importantly, in order to catch prey, they need to sense everything going on in the dark. But it also sacrifices some other factors, namely sharper focus and color vision.

The breadth of a cat’s eye is wider than that of a human eye, reaching 200 degrees, while a human’s eye is only 180 degrees
Cats can see 6 to 8 times better than humans in dark light due to their large number of rod cells, oval pupils, large cornea and tapetum. As shown in the comparison photo, humans have a field of view of 180 degrees, while cats have a field of view of 200 degrees. Peripheral vision on both sides of a cat’s eye is 30 degrees, while humans only have 20 degrees. This can be seen in the amount of blur in each photo.

City night view through cat’s eyes
However, cats don’t have very good vision when looking into distances. Humans can see clearly up to 100 feet (30.48 meters) away, but cats need to stand closer, such as 20 feet (6.1 meters) away. Cats also see only a few colors, namely blues and yellows, which makes their pictures of the world appear washed out. Humans, on the other hand, can clearly see many vibrant colors. Also, while cats are good at catching fast movements, humans have an easier time seeing slower-moving things. “Humans can see motion ten times slower than cats can,” Lem said. “We can see things moving very slowly, but to cats, they don’t appear to be moving.”

Cats have excellent night vision, six times that of humans

From nose to tail, cats perceive the world differently than we do. Although cats and humans have the same five senses, namely sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch, some of their senses are more specialized and more precise in order to survive more easily in the twilight world.

Cats perceive the world completely differently than we do. If we want to use cat claws to walk, we first need to understand how cats experience the world. Although cats have the same five senses as humans—sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch—the way they understand and process sensory information is very different from ours.
Still, cats’ senses are tantalizingly similar to our own, and recognizing this can help us get along more harmoniously with our furry friends. In 2016, Tom and Ruth Roy designated January 2 as the annual Happy Mew Year for Cats Day. As you celebrate the New Year with your cats, you might as well get to know them better and build a better connection with them.

Look

Cats, like people, understand the world around them through vision, and they also rely on their eyesight to hunt for their next lunch. However, the difference in our eyes means that we see the world very differently.
Cats need a bit of light when performing their sudden swoops, although they can leap perfectly in the dark, like the kitten in this photo.
This kitten has heterochromia iridis, which means one of its eyes is blue and the other is green, but this does not affect its vision.
Although cats can pounce with precision in complete darkness, as if they have built-in night vision goggles, they still need a little light. However, comparing the two comparisons, the limit of human night vision is not very good, but cats have a shining moment when they enter the dark night. Over millions of years of evolution, many cats are better equipped to be active and hunt during dusk and dawn.
Light enters the eye through the cornea. The round, transparent surface of your cat’s eye is the cornea, which focuses light on the retina at the back of the eyeball. Cats’ corneas are large and dome-shaped, allowing their eyes to capture the maximum number of photons – a key adaptation they have developed to cope with living in low light. Cat’s pupils are in the shape of vertical strips. They narrow into a slit in broad daylight and dilate when the environment becomes dark. They can expand up to 300 times (human pupils can only expand up to 14 times).
There is also a fluorescent film on the back of the cat’s eyes, which reflects unabsorbed light back to the retina. This adaptation helps cats see in the dark and also makes their eyes shine in the dark when they are illuminated. . Additionally, their peripheral vision is better than ours.
Cats see a more static world with fewer colors than humans, but apparently they can see their own shadows, like the kitten in this picture.
The rest of cat vision isn’t quite as sharp. Because cats have fewer cones, or photoreceptors, in their retinas, we think cats see the world more statically, capturing fewer tones than humans do. These cones also affect the clarity of vision, so although cats have excellent dark vision, their vision is blurry. Cats can only see things from a distance of 60 centimeters, but we can also see them from 30 meters away.
This does not affect their agility. Cats respond more easily to the dynamics of things than to static images full of complex details and colors, so their weak color vision does not trouble them.

Listen

A cat’s triangular ears resemble small, fluffy satellite dishes. Their ears, or pinnae, can independently rotate forward, backward, and sideways to narrow the search area for sound sources. The pinna of the ear can rotate up to 180 degrees, which means that a cat that is three feet away only needs 1/600 of a second (faster than the blink of an eye) to accurately locate the sound source within 10 centimeters.
Newborn kittens’ sense of smell is fully developed and they can find the nearest nipple and start sucking.
Kittens’ ears help them locate sound sources several feet away to within 10 centimeters.
They can also detect extremely subtle differences in sound, even just 1/10 of a pitch change. But just because their ultrasonic hearing is far superior to that of humans and even canines doesn’t mean Beyoncé and Beethoven match cats’ musical tastes. In 2015, research teams from two American universities used melodies dominated by cat sounds for testing. The sounds range from cat purrs to pulsations that simulate the sounds of breastfeeding. The results showed that cats preferred cat music, such as “Cozmo’s Air” and “Rusty’s Ballad,” to songs written for humans.

Sniff

Unlike the other four senses, a kitten’s sense of smell is fully developed when it leaves its mother’s belly. Newborn kittens quickly find the nearest nipple with their noses and take their first sip of nutritious colostrum and regular milk.
Experts believe that cats’ sense of smell is about 13 times stronger than ours. The domestic cat’s olfactory epithelium—the specialized tissue in the nose that contains odor receptors—is five to 10 times the size of the human olfactory epithelium. This gives cats as many as 200 million specialized cells for smell detection, while humans only have 5 million.
The Bengal cat in the photo smelled an unfamiliar scent and opened its mouth. This is an example of a cleft lip sniffing reaction using the vomeronasal organ.
Our feline friends have another tool: the vomeronasal organ. Tucked above the mouth, receptor cells in it connect to parts of the brain responsible for sex, eating and social activities. When a cat smells an interesting odor, it opens its mouth slightly and raises its upper lip. This behavior is called the cleft lip sniffing reaction. This action causes gas molecules to flow toward the vomeronasal organ. At this time, the inhaled gas is captured on at least one of the olfactory epithelium and the vomeronasal organ, giving the cat an additional opportunity to detect odor molecules.

Touch

Kitten whiskers are probably one of our favorite things. But for cats, this is the part they rely on most.
The technical term for cat whiskers is tentacles, which are longer and thicker than ordinary cat hair. Each of a cat’s whiskers develops from hair follicles filled with nerves and blood vessels, so they are as sensitive as human fingertips. These tentacles make up for the cat’s somewhat inferior close-up vision by detecting subtle air movements, which the cat uses to detect the movement of prey and navigate around obstacles.
By reading this, you’ll have a better understanding of how cats experience the world, and your feline friend will seem a little more understanding.
Portions of this work previously appeared in “Secret Life of Cats” by Carrie Arnold. Copyright © 2023 National Geographic Partners.