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I always wondered what screens look like to animals. Whats to say the screen's refresh rate makes sense to some animal's eyes?


Anecdotally, I know that some cats will follow a mouse pointer on the screen and can determine both its movement and location (since some of them will directly attack it if you move it around, particularly if you try to mimic the rough movement behavior of bugs, which is what I assume they think they are attacking).

And FWIW, I've observed this behavior on old 30hz CRTs as well as modern 240hz LCDs and various things in between.


There are computer games made for cats, and of course many videos of them playing them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxW_qPU4KVQ

This one is interesting because the cat tries to reach underneath the tablet to get the mouse, which to me implies that it perceives it as an object rather than just showing a "swat at any movement" reflex.


Apparently you can trick an octopus if you use high definition video, so the display is obviously visible to them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmzfxFF5vDI


I saw a video on television about a decade ago, a fly had landed on a computer monitor, and was following the mouse pointer around the screen.


I'd bet it probably looks jumpy to a cat, but cats seem to find sudden jumpy movements interesting.




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