Vision, Novelty and Fear

Animals see more intense contrasts of light and dark because their night vision is so much better than ours. Good night vision involves excellent vision for contrasts and relatively poor color vision.

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You need to know something about animal's color vision to predict what visual stimuli they'll experience as high-contrast. The breakdown is pretty simple: birds can see four basic colors (ultraviolet, blue, green, and red), people and some primates see three (blue, green, and red), and most of the rest of the mammals see just two (blue and green). With dichromatic, or two-color, vision the colors animals see best are a yellowish green (the color of a safety vest) and bluish purple (which is close to the purple of a purple iris).

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Any sharp contrast between light and dark will draw the attention of a dichromatic animal, either distracting or scaring him. ... However, not all high contrast will scare an animal, only high-contrast visual stimuli that are novel and unexpected.

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Novelty is a huge problem for all animals, all autistic people, all children - and just about all normal grown-ups, too ... Fear of the unknown is universal. If you've never seen something before, you can't make a judgment about it; you don't know if it's good or bad, dangerous or safe. And your brain always wants to make that judgment; that's how the brain works. ... So if you can't tell what something is, you get anxious trying to decide whether it's good or bad.

Any novel object or image in a cow's visual field will get her worried, and if you happen to be trying to move her in the direction of the novel object, forget it.

It's different if you don't try to force things. On its own, an animal will always investigate a novel stimulus, even though new things are scary.

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Finally one day I decided to just lie down flat on my back and see what happened. They all came up to me and sniffed and licked and sniffed and licked. These were feedlot cattle who weren't tame.

Animals in Translation, Temple Grandin, pg 43-46

clipped March 2005

Collection: Philosophy