Question: Do animals see in colour or do their brains change what they see?
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So would dogs be able to see in colour?
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They sure can!!
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Dogs can only see blue and yellow! Everything else is black and white. Is it not? I saw this on a documentary haha
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Dogs can see a limited part of the colour spectrum, because they don’t have as many cones (see above answer) as humans. So they don’t seen in colour like we do, but it’s definitely not just black and white!! 🙂
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I think I saw this document on dogs on youtube last year. I think it said that dogs can only see a few colours.
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That sounds right! They don’t see colour as vividly as us.
Here’s a site which shows an example of how they might see: https://veterinaryvision.com/resources/what-do-dogs-and-cats-see/
I always try to work out what my cat is seeing when I play with her – she really likes orange toys – I am guessing that’s because they’re really bright in cat vision! 😀
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That’s interesting. I thought that dogs were colour blind. I guess not 🙂
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What about narwhals? Can they only see some colours?
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I don’t know if this has been researched! 🙂
Most marine animals see different colours to land animals, because the number of wavelengths in the light which filters down through the water are a lot less than on land. So fish/marine mammals have vision which is specifically adapted to see those colours.
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jcubo03
ibigwood
clawathenathree
narwhalelite004
Most animals see some type of colour; one, two or the whole spectrum! Some animals can even see ultraviolet or infrared, stuff that we can’t even see.
How their brain interprets it though, is another matter. We’re not even entirely sure that your brain interprets blue the same way my brain does. Imagine what we’ve been taught is called ‘blue’, would in your mind actually look like ‘green’ would in my brain. Mind boggling!
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Yes, they can!
Even fish can see in colours!
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Animals see colour differently to how we see it – this is not because of the way it is processed in the brain, rather it is because their eyes are different to ours.
Our eyes have two structures which allows us to see, and these are called rods and cones. Rods respond to whether something is light or dark, and cones respond to colour.
In humans, there are three sorts of cones, and each sort is responsive to a different wavelength of light – so one sort is more responsive to blues, one to reds, and one to greens.
Basically, animals see colour differently because they have cones which are responsive to either a different spectrum of wavelengths than humans, or they aren’t responsive to as many different colours to humans.
It’s kind of like how some humans are colourblind – colour blindness happens when a human is born without one type of cone in their eyes, so they can’t see a particular range of colours.
So the answer is, that it’s a basic physiological difference in the eyes of different animals which determines how they see colour.
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