A Surprise Finding About Mouse Vision Could Change Our View of Cognition

Being able to tell the difference between a photo of something and the actual thing itself is a useful test for better understanding the visual and cognitive function of other primate, birds, and even rats.

How far is this ability to interpret a flat image in the animal kingdom?

The ability to link a 2D image of an object with the actual 3D object itself was demonstrated by mice in a new study.

This means that mice could teach us more about how our brains work. This will give us a better understanding of how picture-to-object equivalence works in the brain.

Robert Stackman from Florida Atlantic University says that their study challenges the view that perceptual limitations of mice render them inappropriate for modeling human memory and visual processing.

Our findings show that a functional mouse hippocampus is required for this form of nonspatial visual recognition memory.

The researchers replaced pictures of an object with two different versions of it in one session, and then showed the mice a different object.

Almost all of the time, the mice wanted to explore the brand new 3D object, suggesting they had seen the other 3D object before.

The same picture-object equivalence powers were shown to be present regardless of object symmetry, likeness, viewing angle, composition, and image realism, and even when differences in low-level visual features were controlled for.

The ability to distinguish between 2D and 3D versions of objects was removed in mouse brains because of a key part of the hippocampus.

The hippocampus is thought to play an essential role in autobiographical or explicit memory in primates.

One can recognize items learned in picture form when they are presented in 3D form. The picture exploration in the mouse hippocampus is likely a form of explicit memory.

The ability to tell the difference between photos and actual objects puts mice on a different level of cognitive processing.

The researchers suggest that the animals are able to separate the representations of objects from the real thing.

With the hippocampus so important in terms of forming and managing memories, it would seem that mice can be more helpful to scientists in their studies of visual recognition and processing than previously thought.

Stackman says that the results provide convincing evidence that the mouse may serve as an effective model organism to investigate higher-order sophisticated aspects of visual perception and recognition.

The research has been published.