Totally TV-free kids, except by accident, a question

[sapphire_chan]

if your kids have seen no TV at all, DVDs, movies, friend's houses, family visits, etc, etc, included--except for completely unavoidable situations like a TV in an unexpected public place:

Could they make any sense of what they were seeing?

Asking because a fiction thing I was reading had a person who'd never seen TV (time travel, person from the past sort of thing) and they saw a TV and thought all the little colored dots were a really lousy way to entertain yourself.

So, was wondering if that is at all real and if anyone has observed that.

[peainthepod]

I know that dogs and cats supposedly can't "see" images on TVs because of the way they work. Something about their eyes processing it too fast (or too slow?) for them to turn the light into understandable images. (All those DVDs marketed for cats and dogs are a silly gimmick, IOW.)

Not sure about people though. I don't think you have to learn to see TV. You just...do. I imagine even someone who's never seen a screen of any kind could immediately see images on a TV screen, barring some sort of neurological or processing disorder. But that's a wild guess.

[rhiOrion]

I have trouble believing that about dogs. My dog absolutely watches TV. And she's twice as interested when there is another dog on TV. And she's deaf, so I know it's not that she's hearing the dog. She also looooved the doggy sitter DVDs (my mom bought them somewhere cheap and gave us one because she knows how much our dog loves the tv!)

[jenfl]

Originally Posted by peainthepod

I know that dogs and cats supposedly can't "see" images on TVs because of the way they work. Something about their eyes processing it too fast (or too slow?) for them to turn the light into understandable images. (All those DVDs marketed for cats and dogs are a silly gimmick, IOW.)

My cats definitely watch TV. I know because they usually totally ignore the TV.... unless there's another animal on it (even with no animal sounds). Then they sit and watch and even get up on their hind legs and bat at it.

[Thalia the Muse]

When television and movies (and nickelodeons and cameras obscura etc.) were first invented, adults saw them for the first time and had no trouble interpreting what they saw. Our brains are pretty driven to interpret and make sense of images.

And cats totally respond to movement on the TV! It's jsut that they eventually realize that there's no real prey item there -- for some of them, that kills their interest, but we had a cat when I was a kid who would sit on top of the TV during baseball games, hang down the front, and bat at the crowd during tracking shots.

[sapphire_chan]

So truth is, in this case, more boring than fiction?

And yeah, my inlaws dogs definitely show more interest in animal planet than in other channels.

[peainthepod]

I stand corrected, mamas. I remember reading it long ago in an article about how those aquarium DVDs that are marketed to cats (and the ones for dogs also) are scammy because the animals can't actually make sense of what they see--they only see the fast motions on the screen. But maybe the article was wrong.

[Kelilah]

Yeah, I also had cats who watched Animal Planet back when I had a TV. They were completely disinterested in the TV unless there were cats on it - I used to watch a show called "Big Cat Diary" that had leopards, lions, and cheetahs on it, and my cats would always come over and watch it with me. They'd lose interest during the commercials or if I changed the channel, but if they saw cats again, they'd come back to it.

I knew they could see the cats on the TV then, but the question that burned in my mind was - how do they know that a leopard is a cat just like them? How are they so interested in lions, but not, say, hyenas? I still never figured that out.

[sapphire_chan]

Originally Posted by peainthepod

I stand corrected, mamas. I remember reading it long ago in an article about how those aquarium DVDs that are marketed to cats (and the ones for dogs also) are scammy because the animals can't actually make sense of what they see--they only see the fast motions on the screen. But maybe the article was wrong.

Maybe someone looked at a study of old blurrier TVs and cats and then just assumed they would continue to not see things?