It appears that people aren’t the only ones enjoying HDTV. The BBC reports that cephalopods – that’s octopus, cuttlefish and squid to you and me – rate high definition television over the standard.
The basis is that researchers often use TVs to show animals pictures of things like food or threats to measure their response to the thing. In this case, the researchers found that when shown images of crabs and other octopus on standard TVs, the octopus didn’t bother responding. However, when shown HDTV images, the octopus did respond, which was a first for cephalopod research.
Octopus and their kind have very good eyesight and are pretty smart so it’s clear that standard definition TV simply isn’t convincing enough to fool them into believing what was on the screen. However, at this stage it’s not entirely clear which feature of HDTV (definition, refresh, scan) is the factor which has made the change.
(Initially, the researchers weren’t even studying this effect – they were actually trying to look at “episodic personalities” in gloomy octopus.)
I wonder what they’ll make of 3D – and how are they going keep the glasses on?