Research overview: feline dichromacy and the limits of cat color vision

Cats are generally understood to be dichromats, possessing two functional cone types rather than the three that give humans full color vision. This overview surveys behavioral and physiological evidence that cats can distinguish some colors, particularly along a blue-to-yellow axis, while struggling with red-green discriminations. Cones are sparse in the cat retina, so color vision is also dim and low in resolution compared with human perception. The survey reviews how researchers tested feline color discrimination using trained choice tasks and how those results align with the cone photopigments identified physiologically. The practical upshot is that cats likely perceive a muted, partially desaturated palette dominated by blues and yellows. This fits an animal whose visual system prioritizes dim-light sensitivity and motion over the rich color discrimination useful to fruit-eating, diurnal primates.