[ExI] quantia game

[Anders Sandberg]

On 03/05/2013 19:07, Dan wrote:
> Since Eugen mention tetrachromacy -- almost typed "tetrachromancy" :) 
> -- did anyone see that report on mantis shrimp:
>
> http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/343056/description/Mantis_shrimp_flub_color_vision_test
>
> Strange that they have some of the hardware, but don't seem to be 
> using it in the expected way.

It is hard to test animals on vision. In Sönke Johnsen's excellent "The 
Optics of Life" he points out that in many domains we are very bad at 
figuring out what makes sense to animals, and this makes our experiments 
less able to tell us much. Mantis shrimp are *weird*. (they show up in 
almost every chapter as an extreme case)

> I also wonder, given that color opponent theory, if there's any 
> processing going on at higher levels. (I might be wrong here, gotten 
> mixed up on what I've read about this, but I presume opponents happen 
> at a higher level of processing than color discrimination. Am I wrong? 
> Maybe I also missed something...)

It is likely the retinal bipolar cells that create the opponent signals, 
which are then transmitted via the optic nerve to the brain. So the 
color discrimination actually works on opponent colors (differences 
between red-green and yellow-blue, plus brightness) rather than the 
"raw" red, green and blue signals.


-- 
Anders Sandberg,
Future of Humanity Institute
Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University

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