cat care > cat vision

Cats can see almost as well as humans can, and at times better. Cat vision is designed for detecting motion, useful for hunting. Like humans, cats have binocular vision, although not as well tuned as in humans. This means a cat most likely sees in 3-D; very useful for judging distance.

 

Cats have an elliptical pupil which opens & closes much faster than round types and allows for a much larger pupil size. This allows more light to enter the eye.

Cats appear to be slightly nearsighted, which would suggest their vision is tailored more for closer objects, such as prey, that they can capture within running distance. Objects farther than several hundred yards rarely interest a cat.

A cat relies on its extremely sensitive hearing and directional ear movement to locate the general location of prey, then targets and captures the prey using its keen eyesight. Cat vision is adapted to capture even the slightest movement. This makes the cat one of the most successful hunters on land.

Like ours, cats' eyes have two distinct types of light sensitive cells in the retina - rods and cones. Rods are the receptors that the eye uses for night time viewing and sudden movement. Cones are used during the daytime and process color information.There are about 25 rods to each cone (human eyes have four to one), and their nerve connections are arranged in such a way that stimuli to a large number of rods reinforce each other to trigger a signal in one nerve fibre. As a result, the response of many rods to very dim light is pooled, so that (when combined with the wide pupil aperture and the effect of the tapetum) far less light is needed for the cat to perceive objects than for humans.

 

Cats' eyes, as every motorist knows, shine when caught in a beam of light at night. This is due to the tapetum luvidum, a mirror like membrane that lines most of the back of the retina. It reflects the light passing through the rods... back through the rods a second time, this time in the opposite direction. The tapetum reflects any light not absorbed on its first passage through the retina. As a result, the retina's light sensitive cells receive a second stimulation, increasing the eye's sensitivity to dim light.The combination of elliptical pupils and the Tapetum permit cats to see extremely well in near darkness.

The picture on the left is how a human would see in near darkness and on the right, how a cat would see. In low light, like night, color and hue are not perceived, only black, white and shades of gray.

It is a fallacy to say that cats can see in the dark, however - it may seem dark to us, but some glimmer of light must be there for the cat to see.

Pictures left to right, show how humans would view, how cats would view and how an animal with no or little color perception would view.

*Kitty Show continues to do Cat Vision research to provide more information on how and what cats perceive. The information presented above is a result from that research as well as existing scientific research.
It must be noted, that no human or test can be 100% positive how any animal perceives things. We can only make educated predictions based on our vision compared to test results. The pictures above are based upon color tests. By removing the colors / hue's that cats did not respond to and adjusting the brightness differences to available light within a cats eye, we believe these images to be as accurate as we can be. It's our best guess.