The absolute threshold of colour vision in the horse.
(2008) In PLoS ONE 3(11).- Abstract
- Arrhythmic mammals are active both during day and night if they are allowed. The arrhythmic horses are in possession of one of the largest terrestrial animal eyes and the purpose of this study is to reveal whether their eye is sensitive enough to see colours at night. During the day horses are known to have dichromatic colour vision. To disclose whether they can discriminate colours in dim light a behavioural dual choice experiment was performed. We started the training and testing at daylight intensities and the horses continued to choose correctly at a high frequency down to light intensities corresponding to moonlight. One Shetland pony mare, was able to discriminate colours at 0.08 cd/m(2), while a half blood gelding, still... (More)
- Arrhythmic mammals are active both during day and night if they are allowed. The arrhythmic horses are in possession of one of the largest terrestrial animal eyes and the purpose of this study is to reveal whether their eye is sensitive enough to see colours at night. During the day horses are known to have dichromatic colour vision. To disclose whether they can discriminate colours in dim light a behavioural dual choice experiment was performed. We started the training and testing at daylight intensities and the horses continued to choose correctly at a high frequency down to light intensities corresponding to moonlight. One Shetland pony mare, was able to discriminate colours at 0.08 cd/m(2), while a half blood gelding, still discriminated colours at 0.02 cd/m(2). For comparison, the colour vision limit for several human subjects tested in the very same experiment was also 0.02 cd/m(2). Hence, the threshold of colour vision for the horse that performed best was similar to that of the humans. The behavioural results are in line with calculations of the sensitivity of cone vision where the horse eye and human eye again are similar. The advantage of the large eye of the horse lies not in colour vision at night, but probably instead in achromatic tasks where presumably signal summation enhances sensitivity. (Less)
Please use this url to cite or link to this publication:
https://lup.lub.lu.se/record/1271572
- author
- Roth, Lina LU ; Balkenius, Anna LU and Kelber, Almut LU
- organization
- publishing date
- 2008
- type
- Contribution to journal
- publication status
- published
- subject
- in
- PLoS ONE
- volume
- 3
- issue
- 11
- article number
- e3711
- publisher
- Public Library of Science (PLoS)
- external identifiers
-
- wos:000265166000011
- scopus:56649097247
- pmid:19002261
- ISSN
- 1932-6203
- DOI
- 10.1371/journal.pone.0003711
- language
- English
- LU publication?
- yes
- id
- 120bf27d-1096-46b8-8dcd-dd8162000a32 (old id 1271572)
- date added to LUP
- 2016-04-01 13:21:00
- date last changed
- 2024-01-09 12:09:13
@article{120bf27d-1096-46b8-8dcd-dd8162000a32,
abstract = {{Arrhythmic mammals are active both during day and night if they are allowed. The arrhythmic horses are in possession of one of the largest terrestrial animal eyes and the purpose of this study is to reveal whether their eye is sensitive enough to see colours at night. During the day horses are known to have dichromatic colour vision. To disclose whether they can discriminate colours in dim light a behavioural dual choice experiment was performed. We started the training and testing at daylight intensities and the horses continued to choose correctly at a high frequency down to light intensities corresponding to moonlight. One Shetland pony mare, was able to discriminate colours at 0.08 cd/m(2), while a half blood gelding, still discriminated colours at 0.02 cd/m(2). For comparison, the colour vision limit for several human subjects tested in the very same experiment was also 0.02 cd/m(2). Hence, the threshold of colour vision for the horse that performed best was similar to that of the humans. The behavioural results are in line with calculations of the sensitivity of cone vision where the horse eye and human eye again are similar. The advantage of the large eye of the horse lies not in colour vision at night, but probably instead in achromatic tasks where presumably signal summation enhances sensitivity.}},
author = {{Roth, Lina and Balkenius, Anna and Kelber, Almut}},
issn = {{1932-6203}},
language = {{eng}},
number = {{11}},
publisher = {{Public Library of Science (PLoS)}},
series = {{PLoS ONE}},
title = {{The absolute threshold of colour vision in the horse.}},
url = {{http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0003711}},
doi = {{10.1371/journal.pone.0003711}},
volume = {{3}},
year = {{2008}},
}