Color Discrimination in Dogs

Tanaka, Toshio; Watanabe, Tamiko; Eguchi, Yusuke; Yoshimoto, Tadashi

doi:10.2508/chikusan.71.300

Cited by 11 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 11 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Even with this limitation in mind, dogs appear to be attentive to the colors they can perceive. Two Shiba dogs were able to appropriately identify a positive stimulus (red, blue, or green compared to grey) in a two-choice discrimination task, where the light intensity on the cards was 450-500 lux (Tanaka, Watanabe, Eguchi, & Yoshimoto, 2000). The authors of this study suggested that color vision is relatively well developed, considering the dogs were able to discriminate between all three primary colors and grey.…”

Section: Color Visionmentioning

confidence: 85%

What do dogs (Canis familiaris) see? A review of vision in dogs and implications for cognition research

et al. 2017

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Over the last 20 years, a large amount of research has been conducted in an attempt to uncover the cognitive abilities of the domestic dog. While substantial advancements have been made, progress has been impeded by the fact that little is known about how dogs visually perceive their external environment. It is imperative that future research determines more precisely canine visual processing capabilities, particularly considering the increasing number of studies assessing cognition via paradigms requiring vision. This review discusses current research on visual cognition and emphasizes the importance of understanding dog visual processing. We review several areas of vision research in domestic dogs, such as sensitivity to light, visual perspective, visual acuity, form perception, and color vision, with a focus on how these abilities may affect performance in cognition tasks. Additionally, we consider the immense diversity seen in dog morphology and explore ways in which these physical differences, particularly in facial morphology, may result in, or perhaps even be caused by, different visual processing capacities in dogs. Finally, we suggest future directions for research in dog vision and cognition.

show abstract

Section: Color Visionmentioning

confidence: 85%

What do dogs (Canis familiaris) see? A review of vision in dogs and implications for cognition research

et al. 2017

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The first method relies on assumptions (often groundless or completely incorrect) about the animal's luminous efficiency function (i.e. the spectral sensitivity function, which determines the brightness of the stimuli as seen by the animal) [9][10][11]. The second method is not only labour-and time-consuming; its main shortcoming is that animals are actually trained that brightness is an unreliable cue, even though they could use it when discriminating the stimuli.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Colour cues proved to be more informative for dogs than brightness

2013

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The results of early studies on colour vision in dogs led to the conclusion that chromatic cues are unimportant for dogs during their normal activities. Nevertheless, the canine retina possesses two cone types which provide at least the potential for colour vision. Recently, experiments controlling for the brightness information in visual stimuli demonstrated that dogs have the ability to perform chromatic discrimination. Here, we show that for eight previously untrained dogs colour proved to be more informative than brightness when choosing between visual stimuli differing both in brightness and chromaticity. Although brightness could have been used by the dogs in our experiments (unlike previous studies), it was not. Our results demonstrate that under natural photopic lighting conditions colour information may be predominant even for animals that possess only two spectral types of cone photoreceptors.

show abstract

“…Humans are trichromats and can differentiate hues of blue (380-550 nm), green (430-670 nm), and red (500-760 nm), whereas dogs are dichromats and can differentiate well only hues of blue (430-485 nm) and yellow (500-620 nm; . Therefore, color vision in dogs resembles red-green color blindness in humans, but contrary to popular belief dogs can still discriminate red and green from gray; both dogs and humans have a spectral neutral point at 480 and 505 nm, respectively, which is important for differentiating shades of gray (Byosiere, Chouinard, Howell, & Bennett, 2019;Tanaka & Watanabe, 2000). Even though dogs see a narrower range of colors than humans, they tend to use color as a more important visual cue for differentiation than brightness differences (Kasparson, Badridze, & Maximov, 2013).…”

Section: Color Visionmentioning

confidence: 92%

Functional performance of the visual system in dogs and humans: A comparative perspective

Barber¹,

Mills²,

Montealegre-Z³

et al. 2020

CCBR

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Vision in dogs is generally considered poor compared with humans, and recent reports have reviewed some of the physiological principles underpinning dog vision, but a systematic comparison of the physiological and neurobiological features of vision in dogs compared with humans appears to be lacking. This means there is a risk of an anthropocentric perspective of the topic rather than an understanding grounded in a wider biological context. It is also important to appreciate that deficits in one aspect may be compensated for in other parts of the visual system, so generalizing about performance on the basis of a single feature within the visual system might be misleading. This review provides an overview of the visual perceptual abilities of dogs versus humans, grounded in the visual system's physical structures (see supplementary information) for detecting different visual features of the environment through to its initial processing prior to its cognitive evaluation. Differences and variations that exist between dogs and humans and why these might occur are considered, by reference to their natural history (ecological factors affecting their evolution) and differences in morphology (including differences in height, which will affect viewpoint and the visual information available to individuals in the same location). The implications of differences and applications for everyday handling and training of the dogs are discussed throughout.

show abstract

Color Discrimination in Dogs

Cited by 11 publications

References 11 publications

What do dogs (Canis familiaris) see? A review of vision in dogs and implications for cognition research

What do dogs (Canis familiaris) see? A review of vision in dogs and implications for cognition research

Colour cues proved to be more informative for dogs than brightness

Functional performance of the visual system in dogs and humans: A comparative perspective

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About