alt Hacker NewsThey say 'leftward sleeping position would provide a fast left visual field', while showing a cat sleeping on its left side, with its right eye having the best view (left eye with a bad view).
Clearly, there is a contradiction. What's mystifying is that the authors seemingly spent lots of time on this exact directionality concept, yet put this contradiction in.
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Not a biologist, but my understanding is that the temporal part of the right eye (the part of the right eye closest to the temple and furthest from the nose) is responsible for processing the inner part of the left visual field, and is directly connected to the right hemisphere (no cross-over required).
As mentioned before, this study is clearly funded by Big Cat to distract and confuse Big Mouse.
The way I understand it, they say that animals react better to danger coming from the left side, because the left visual field (of both eyes) is processed by the right hemisphere, which is dominant for threat processing and spatial attention. So, for the cat sleeping on the left side the danger will probably come from the left side of its visual field, while for cat sleeping on the right side it would come from the right side of the visual field. Therefore, sleeping on the left side is better, because the cat will react faster to something coming towards it.
Look at this picture to see how the image from both eyes is processed:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_system#/media/File:Huma...
(this is for human visual system, but it's the same for a cat I guess?)
The important thing is not the left/right eye, but the left/right side of both eyes.