You all keep forgetting cats can see spirits. Have you never seen your cat staring at nothing and moving his/her head around as if he was visually tracking something? And when you look you see nothing there? I am telling you cats are half way in the spirit world and half in the real world, just as the ancient Egyptians believed.

ah yes, kinda like the cats on the discworld *g*

New positive quality: Vision within the octarine spectrum ;D
(It was "octarine", right? Or did I remember incorrectly?)

nono, octarine is correct.
the eight and all that stuff *g*

Actually, cats are all psychos. They are visually tracking hallucinations.

Pfftt! Shows you what you all know. Cats are actually pre-Awakening technomancers and what you're seeing is them interacting with their organic AR interface.

Cats have a very keen sense of smell. I'd give them a Specialization in Perception (Scent or Olfactory if you prefer).

A cat's sense of smell is nowhere as acute as a dog's. They do have excellent nightvision and hearing. If they were to have a perception specialisation I'd put it in vision or hearing before I put it in scent.

...As B. Kliban once said: Cats can see things we can't

cats more or less have their own version of the echolot power . . but strictly passive.
they don't emmit any sounds that get reflected to them(sneaky paws), but with the sounds they do get they can make up an image that is to them about 90% accurate of what they would see . . add into that the fact that they can feel the air-flow around things they basically have their own little radar to tell them what is going on where . . only times you manage to surprise a cat is if it's sleeping or if it's completely focusing its attention on something else . . and even if the nose is nowhere as acute as a dogs, it's still several times as accute as that of humans . . as are their ears . . around 30x i think is about right O.o . .

Which is what? 90% of the time

i can count the number of times i actually managed to surprise my cat on both hands . . and i'd probably have fingers left O.o
cats don't really SLEEP all that time . . they nap =^.^=
which means they are just too lazy to keep their eyes open, but whiskers and ears are still 100% working

They both have a better sense of smell than humans. Dogs up to 100x better. I have not found any quantifiers on feline olfaction as yet, other than to state that cats are much better than humans, but dogs are better.

I do know that dogs will eat dung, but cat's will not even eat anything if they can't smell it, so maybe it's all how they use the information their noses give them? I guess that really just suggests that cat's have a higher Intuition score than dogs, or better taste in edibles.

As for surprising cats, I have two that sleep on top of my computer and tower, they both sleep so hard they sometimes, roll and fall off onto me. Surprise!!!.

WMS

*snickers* who's more surprised? you being dropped on, or the cats dropping onto you?

Yes to both,,typically when I am posting here or reading something here, and looking concentrating on the screen and not them, they roll off.

WMS

*grin* DEATH FROM ABOVE!

...while better than humans, felines do not have near the olfactory acuity of canines. Sight, hearing and touch are a feline's more important senses.

Visual acuity is somewhat poor at close range in that they cannot make out extremely fine details (in sense, cats tend be farsighted). It is also now realised that felines have limited colour vision, able to discern blues, greens, and yellows as subdued shades yet unable to discern reds (due to the retinal structure that allows them to see in extremely low light). Feline sight is also more keyed to movement.

The whiskers are very sensitive as are the hair follicles in the ears, allowing a cat to notice changes in air movement. The same goes for the skin. It you tickle the just very ends of a cat's fur you will notice it twitch the entire area of skin underneath.

While a feline doesn't possess the extreme hearing range that a dog has, they have the ability to locate sound sources by moving their ears. In a sense the outer portion of the ear acts like a parabolic microphone.

I would say that it is because the L-type cone (the one that detects red, as opposed to the types which detect blue and green) is a primate invention. Most non-primate mammals only have blues through yellows. Exceptions exist, I believe.

edit: The low-light sensitivity is what causes the relatively poor detailed vision, not the red-color blindness, as there is only so much retinal real-estate, and there's a tradeoff between rods and cones.
Their acuity does peak at the center of their retina, though. (which is also not true of many non-primates) They don't have a true fovea, like a primate, but they have something called an "area centralis", which does basically the same thing, only not as well.
/nitpick

Yoiks, Moon-Hawk must be an eye doctor! Or at least have a degree in biology... Good stuff

well, the other part in giving cats their very good nightvision is the reflecting skin in the back of the eye, so light actually passed by the receptors twice . . this is also why they get those nifty looking glowy eyes . . like little flashlights that shine directly into your head . .

A bit late to join this side-debate, but enjoy.

Biomedical Engineering, actually; I'm not a doctor. I work in a government-funded neurology research lab, working specifically with the neurology of eye and head movement coordination. If I get my way in a few years I'll change jobs and be designing cybereyes, but we'll see. So, um, yeah. BTW everything KK said was correct, other than saying that X was due to Y instead of X being due to Z, but X Y and Z were all still true. If I was overly brief its because I was on my way out the door. Sorry.


Precisely. This also contributes somewhat to their loss of acuity, since when the light reflects off of the tapetum lucidum it scatters a bit, so while their receptors have two chances to grab those photons instead of one, it does blur things a little.
As far as how much acuity loss is due to each of the multiple factors discussed, I have absolutely no idea. I do 95% of my work with human subjects.

I hereby place a preorder for cybereyes that enhance my visual acuity to superhuman levels and let me see in the dark. Get to work!

I get dibs on the first ones that let me read dumpshock while walking.

Dude I just want to get rid of my glasses and see really far. An image link would just be pure cash money too.

So yeah, put me down for a pair.