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Do faster moving animals (cats, birds, flies etc.) perceive the world as "going in slow motion" relative to how humans & slower animals see it? The basic question is; Does a cat's word look like our world slowed down 20%? While viewing some footage shot at 1,000,000 frames per second.
Oct 16, 2013 · Cats can see 30 degrees on each side. Their visual field overall is just bigger—they see 200 degrees compared to our 180 degrees. Cat vision isn’t so great at a distance. What we can see...
- Overview
- Sight
- Sound
- Smell
- Touch
Cats use the same five senses as humans, but they view the world differently. Understanding them could make us better cat parents.
From nose to tail, cats sense the world very differently from the one we travel through. Though cats use the same five senses as humans—sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch—some of theirs are more specialized and more precise, allowing them to live more easily in a twilight world.
The world according to cats is very different from the one we travel through. To walk in a cat’s paws, we first need to understand how a cat experiences the world. Although cats use the same senses as humans—sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch—they understand and process their inputs quite differently.
But knowing they have some tantalizingly similar senses to ours can help us live more harmoniously with our furry friends. So on Happy Mew Year for Cats Day, learn more about how your cat works, and maybe sense a better connection.
Like humans, cats use their vision to see the world around them—and to hunt down their next snack. But differences between human and cat eyes mean that we see the world quite differently.
Cats do need some light to pounce, though this kitten would also do an excellent job jumping in the dark (left). This kitten (right) has a condition called heterochromia—one blue eye and one green eye—that does not affect its vision.
Photograph by Seth Casteel, National Geographic Creative Images (Left) and Photograph by Mitsuaki Iwago, Minden Pictures (Right)
Although a cat’s precision pouncing in the dark may make it seem that she has built-in night vision goggles, cats do need some light. But though a human’s night vision is iffy at best, the dark is a cat’s time to shine. Millions of years of evolution have made it more likely that many cats will be active and hunt at dusk and dawn.
Light enters the eye through the cornea, the round, transparent surface of the cat’s eye. The cornea focuses light on the retina, which lines the back of the eye on the inside. A cat’s cornea is large and dome-shaped, letting cat eyes gather the maximum number of photons—a key adaptation to their low-light living. Cat pupils are long and vertical, narrowing to a slit in broad daylight but expanding up to 300-fold when it’s darker (human pupils grow only 15 times bigger).
The backs of a cat’s eyes have a layer called the tapetum lucidum, which reflects unabsorbed light back into the retinas, an adaptation to help the cat see in dim light, and causes eye shine, the glow that can be seen when light shines on them in the dark. Their peripheral vision is also better than ours.
A cat’s triangle-shaped ears act like small, furry satellite dishes. Their ear flaps, or pinnae, can independently rotate forward, backward, and sideways to zero in on a sound’s location. The pinnae’s 180 degrees of rotation means that cats can pinpoint the location of a sound to within several inches in just six-hundredths of a second—faster than the blink of an eye—from up to three feet away.
Newborn kittens (left) have a fully developed sense of smell and can find the nearest teat to suckle. This kitten's ears (right) are built to help it zero in on locations of sounds within a few inches from just a few feet away.
Photograph by Andrew Marrtila (Left) and Photograph by Paul Biris, Getty Images (Right)
They can also distinguish extremely subtle differences in sounds, even as little as one-tenth of a tone. But their ultrasonic hearing (far superior to humans and even dogs) doesn’t mean that Beyoncé and Beethoven are to a cat’s musical tastes. In 2015, a research team from two U.S. universities tested tunes incorporating feline-centric sounds that included purring and a pulse reminiscent of suckling. The results showed that cats preferred the cat songs (“Cozmo’s Air” and “Rusty’s Ballad”) to music composed for people.
Smell, unlike the other four senses, is fully developed straight out of the cat womb. The newborn kitten quickly uses its nose to navigate toward the nearest nipple and get its first sip of nourishing colostrum and milk.
Experts believe that a cat’s sense of smell is about 14 times better than ours. A domestic cat’s olfactory epithelium— the specialized tissue in the nose containing the receptors that detect odors—is five to 10 times larger than a human’s. As a result, cats have up to 200 million specialized cells that detect smells, compared with our mere five million.
Whiskers on kittens may be one of our favorite things, but cats really depend on them.
Known formally as a vibrissa, a whisker is longer and thicker than normal cat hair. Each of a feline’s whiskers grows from a follicle packed with nerves and blood vessels, making them as sensitive as human fingertips. These vibrissae help to compensate for a cat’s less-than-stellar close vision. They detect subtle air movements that can indicate the presence of prey and help cats navigate around obstacles.
Now that you have a better understanding of how cats walk through our world, your feline friend might make a little more sense.
Portions of this work have previously appeared in Secret Life of Cats by Carrie Arnold. Copyright © 2023 National Geographic Partners, LLC. Available here and wherever books and magazines are sold.
Aug 3, 2023 · Based on its size and appearance, I initially presumed it was someone’s pet inexplicably out in the bush. But further scrutiny revealed distinctive features: legs slightly longer than those of most...
Oct 16, 2013 · A series of photographs tries to capture the world as cats see it, with both their better night vision and exceptional ability to capture peripheral motion.
Dec 20, 2023 · Cat vision is sharpest at around that 20-foot mark, with objects closer and further away from that likely looking blurry and unfocused. Peripheral Vision. Human eyes have a visual field of around 180 degrees. Cats have a wider field of vision at around 200 degrees due to their increased number of rod cells.
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Feb 22, 2022 · To know where to pounce, a cat needs to know how far to leap. Since each eye captures only a flat, 2-D picture of the world, stereo vision is needed to infer depth information from the visual...
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