Thursday
Mar252010
Your calamari wants a flat screen


The explanation appears to lie not in the resolution of the screen (how small the pixels are) so much as how fast the picture can be draw and redrawn on the screen. The picture on a TV screen is constantly being created line-by-line from the top of the screen in a process called rastering. We don't perceive this rastering because it happens faster than we can see; faster than our "critical flicker frequency". Well, not everyone has the same critical flicker frequency, and nor do all televisions have the same rastering rate. Most hi-def TV's have a higher frequency (120 or even 240Hz, or times-per-second). It may be that low-def TV is below the octopus critical flicker, but hi-def is above it. In this way, they would see a sort of strobing effect in normal footage, but the hi-def stuff would look like, well, a crab.
The authors also noticed that the octopus showed "episodic personality", which is to say they were interested in the crab (or footage of another octopus) some times but not others. I'm not sure I would class that as evidence of personality, just a less-than-100%-predictable response to a stimulus. Having said that, ocotpus do have obvious personalities, which is one reason people are so drawn to them. That, and sweet chilli sauce...Pronk, R., Wilson, D., & Harcourt, R. (2010). Video playback demonstrates episodic personality in the gloomy octopus Journal of Experimental Biology, 213 (7), 1035-1041 DOI: 10.1242/jeb.040675








