… and also how we can be sure about that data, considering that we humans don’t see all colors ourselves?
In: 10
Animals can be trained to do certain things.
For example: you can train a dog/bird/rat/etc. that touching a dot with a triangle on it means the trainer will give it a treat. Place a bunch of white dots across a table/floor, with only one having the triangle, and the animal will walk over and touch the triangle one.
Now, just change up the colors. If it recognizes the yellow triangle on the blue dots, it can differentiate those colors. If it CAN’T tell which red dot has a green triangle on it, it will wander around instead of tapping the correct one (because they all look the same to it).
By doing this with many color combinations, scientists can figure out which base colors the animal can and can’t see.
To answer your human perception question: we can’t see all “colors” with our naked eyes, but we can build machines that detect basically every wavelength possible. If we can’t see it, our machines definitely can.
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