Summary of body pattern responses from the findings reported here and from previous work. (a–c) Findings from Zylinski et al. [33] showing cuttlefish respond equally with disruptive components to whole printed two-dimensional ‘objects’, the outlines of such objects (i.e. object edges with no corresponding area), and one-fourth circle fragments of the object edges (note that high-passed edges were used in these experiments, but our positive control (b) confirms the response to this stimulus without high-pass filtering). (d) The bridge between previous work and the worked presented in this study. When edges are reduced further the disruptive components are no longer expressed and mottle-type patterns are used instead. We based our fragments for the experiments reported here on this relative size of edge, showing that when these are scattered on the background (figure 1a(iv)) the response is of the mottle type. (e) Crucially to our test here, when these fragments are clustered in an anomalous configuration (rotated randomly on their axes; figure 1a(iii)) they are still treated as separate pieces of visual information, with the response being a mottle. (f) When fragments are orientated to form a circle (figure 1a(ii)) the response changes to one containing disruptive components. (g,h) Illustrate how small objects and uniform backgrounds result in mottle and uniform patterns, respectively (e.g. negative control stimulus here (figure 1a(v)), see also earlier studies [26,28]).