Many cat owners have probably noticed that a cat’s whiskers can move. As a type of “sensory hair,” they are completely different from human facial hair. When the surrounding light is dim, cats use these sensory hairs to enhance their perception and improve movement and navigation. Whiskers can detect extremely subtle air currents, allowing cats to sense the position of obstacles even when their vision is unclear.The tips of a cat’s whiskers align perfectly with the width of its ears, marking the minimum space its body can pass through. This means a cat can quickly judge whether a pathway is passable—even in total darkness. So, although a cat’s eyesight isn’t as sharp as a human’s, and they are technically color-blind, it doesn’t matter. Cats excel at low-light vision and rely heavily on their hearing and keen sense of smell. As long as you don’t trim their whiskers for no reason, your feline friend will always remain an efficient and highly capable predator.
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What Can Cats Actually See?
To better understand how the world looks through a cat’s eyes compared with a human’s, artist Nickolay Lamm consulted experts from three different fields. The biggest difference between feline vision and human vision lies in the retina. The retina is a layer of tissue at the back of the eye that contains light-sensitive cells. These cells convert incoming light into electrical signals. After these signals are processed by nerve cells, they are sent to the brain, where they are ultimately translated into the images we see.There are two types of photoreceptor cells: rods and cones. Rod cells handle peripheral vision and night vision and detect brightness and shades of gray. Cone cells handle daytime vision and color perception. Cats (and dogs) have a large number of rod cells but relatively few cone cells. Humans are the opposite. That’s why our night vision is inferior to a cat’s, but our ability to perceive color is much stronger.
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Field of View
A field of view refers to the width of the visual area when the eyes focus on a single point—this includes what we see directly ahead as well as what we can detect above, below, and to the sides. A cat’s field of view spans about 200 degrees, which is slightly wider than the human average of 180 degrees.
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Visual Acuity
Visual acuity refers to how sharp and clear an image appears to the eye. Human visual acuity averages around 20/20, while cats fall somewhere between 20/100 and 20/200. In practical terms, this means that for a cat to see an image as clearly as a human does from 100 feet (about 30.5 meters) or 200 feet (about 61 meters) away, the cat must move up to within 20 feet (about 6.1 meters) of the object. This is why the lower image in the comparison picture often appears so blurry.
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Color Vision
Many people believe that cats cannot see color and only perceive the world in shades of gray. This is actually incorrect. Humans are known as trichromats—we have three types of cone cells, allowing us to see red, green, and blue. Current research shows that cats are also trichromats, but their color perception works differently.A cat’s vision resembles that of a color-blind human. Cats can see various shades of blue and green but cannot distinguish red or pink. These colors tend to appear more greenish to them, while purple looks like a deeper shade of blue. The range of hues and saturation that cats can perceive is also far less rich than what humans can see.
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Night Vision
Although cats cannot see fine details and do not perceive a wide spectrum of colors, their retinas contain a dense concentration of rod cells that are highly sensitive to low light. As a result, cats can see extremely well in the dark. In fact, they need only about one-sixth of the light that humans require to see clearly.
Cats have an additional structure behind the retina known as the tapetum lucidum, often referred to as a “reflective layer.” This layer significantly enhances their night vision. The cells within the tapetum lucidum function like tiny mirrors, reflecting light that has already passed through the rods and cones back across the retina. This allows the photoreceptor cells to capture and use even the faintest traces of light a second time.This is also the reason why a cat’s eyes often appear to glow in the dark.
