point to ponder - what do horses see?

[puddicat]

So you're at a SJ competition and the poles and fillers are painted with all sorts of colours in potentially scary patterns. Does your horse have/do you assume your horse has the same ability to see colour (and hence patterns made by contrasting colours) as humans? Does it matter?

 

[RLF]

it matters to my mare, she hates the pretty patterns on fillers, just have to use more leg

 

[WishfulThinker]

I remember being told they see colour, but it has like a reddish tint ot it

 

[Jemayni]

Well my pony absolutly refuses point blank to SJ. But happily skips around a county workers course.

 

[chestnut cob]

No, I don't assume/think he sees the same things as me. Things that scare me don't always bother him, yet he will spook at apparently nothing, or something that hasn't bothered me/I hadn't noticed. So presumably we're seeing different things, or maybe it's just that different things bother us?!

 

[pixie]

No they don't have the same ability as us, hence some coloured poles are more difficult for them to distinguish from the background. I think its particularly distinguishing green and yellow that they have problems

 

[puddicat]

Yep, it's fascinating isn't it, it would have never occured to me when I was a kitten, but red will look yellow and green will look yellow so differentiating between red an yellow and yellow and green and green and red might be an issue. So if you put your horse in an orchard full of red apples amongst green leaves, your apples are safe!

 

[chestnut cob]

[ QUOTE ]
Yep, it's fascinating isn't it, it would have never occured to me when I was a kitten, but red will look yellow and green will look yellow so differentiating between red an yellow and yellow and green and green and red might be an issue. So if you put your horse in an orchard full of red apples amongst green leaves, your apples are safe!

[/ QUOTE ]

So...does that mean they think/see grass as yellow, not green??

 

[puddicat]

Yes, horses don't do green. So finding a banana in a field could be difficult....

 

[Allykat]

[ QUOTE ]
So if you put your horse in an orchard full of red apples amongst green leaves, your apples are safe!

[/ QUOTE ]

Not neccessarily......horses will sniff an apple out much quicker than we can

 

[puddicat]

"red will look yellow"

hang on.... get a grip puddicat, red will look blue/grey not yellow - sorry. Orange would look yellow because it's got yellow in it.

so for example if you had a scary filler pattern in orange and green, its possible depending on the shades of the colours, that the horse would see no pattern, just a yellow filler!

 

[chestnut cob]

Well, I've learnt something tonight!

How do we know this is the case?

 

[puddicat]

Oh yes, forgot about that, so that's why all my apples keep disappearing then!

 

[Skhosu]

My eventer- wouldn't notice if the fence was made up of flashing neon lights..
any filler can end a round for the pony!

 

[puddicat]

There are a couple of approaches, you can examine the retina and characterise the cones in the eye eg. Carroll et al. (2001) J. Vis. or you do a behavioural study where the horse selects a coloured picture (with its nose) if it can see the colours eg. Hangii and Ingersoll (2007) J. Comp. Psyc. The first method can be used to obtain spectral sensitivity and hence allow a mock up of how horses see the world.

There have been several studies showing that horses in common with most mammals are dichromatic seeing blue/yellow but not red/green (Humans are trichromats). The Hangii and Ingersoll paper conclude that horse vision is similar to humans with a red/green deficiency.

 

[PapaFrita]

I read about this in an issue of H&H a few years back; how patterns rather than colours can affect spatial awareness (for horse, not rider... or maybe rider too) also said that horses don't see 'up' very far, so jumping through those circly things at horsetrials isn't usually a problem, but they need to raise their heads a bit to see further forward, and how dressage horses with their noses down actually see very little around them at all.
Not very good at explaining what I read... sorry
I'd like to add though that PF sees dragons and lions in every plastic bag she comes across

 

[ann-jen]

I find it interesting (but slightly worrying LOL) that when jumping, the fence enters the horse's blind spot just about at take off point. Makes you realise when jumping off a tight corner in a jump off, for example, how little time the horse has to assess the jump before launching over it.

 

[puddicat]

Yes i don't particularly like the idea of sitting on the back of something that is trying to pull off a carefully controlled manoeuvre using eyes on the side of its head. Fortunately, by the time it gets to taking off it has already had to work out where the fence is, so as long as the fence doesn't move at the last minute it's OK (now there's an idea).

There's a rather nice experiment with cats showing that they see and remember what's coming about 3 steps ahead. Also there's a classic study with human long jumpers showing that they make adjustments on the approach so by the time they reach take off they are ideally situated for the jump.

I think you're right about jumping off a tight corner though, I've never tried working it out but it wouldn't surprise me if it required some educated guesswork on the part of the horse to work out when to take off.

 

[puddicat]

So here's an example. The horse one is not quite right due to the limitations of Microsoft Photo Editor, but they give a pretty good idea.

We see this:

...and neddy sees this: