Research overview: behavioral tests of color discrimination in cats

Establishing that an animal sees color requires showing it can discriminate hues independent of brightness, a demanding behavioral test. This overview surveys studies that trained cats to choose colored targets while controlling for luminance cues, work that historically proved difficult because cats often default to brightness. The general conclusion is that cats can be trained to make some color discriminations, especially between blue and yellow regions of the spectrum, but they do so less readily and less finely than primates. The survey discusses why these experiments are challenging, including the cat's strong reliance on brightness and motion and its limited interest in arbitrary color tasks. The findings temper popular claims at both extremes: cats are neither colorblind nor richly trichromatic, but limited dichromats whose color perception is real yet secondary to other visual priorities.