Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

86BillionFireflies t1_iufkea0 wrote

Reply to comment by MalevolentlyInformed in Is the eyesight of small animals like mice and snakes as poor as ours would be if our retinas were the size of theirs? by AbouBenAdhem

The key piece of information that's often left out is that their color vision is actually terrible.

Picture a movie playing in color. Now picture three black-and-white movies playing side by side: one showing the red channel, one showing the green channel, one showing the blue channel. Same information, but there's a lot of stuff your brain can't actually SEE if the information isn't combined the right way.

The mantis shrimp doesn't combine information across color channels the way we do, for a simple reason: its expensive. It takes a lot of extra neurons to combine different cone inputs in a way that lets you see what we know as color, and neurons cost calories.

2

Dorocche t1_iug09yc wrote

How do we know that the shrimp doesn't do that? We can't observe their qualia obviously.

2

86BillionFireflies t1_iuhghij wrote

We can do (and have done) experiments to determine how well they can distinguish one color stimulus from another, and they perform worse than humans (and worse than other animals with true color vision).

4