Natural environment statistics in the upper and lower visual field are reflected in mouse retinal specializations.

Pressures for survival make sensory circuits adapted to a species' natural habitat and its behavioral challenges. Thus, to advance our understanding of the visual system, it is essential to consider an animal's specific visual environment by capturing natural scenes, characterizing their statistical regularities, and using them to probe visual computations. Mice, a prominent visual system model, have salient visual specializations, being dichromatic with enhanced sensitivity to green and UV in the dorsal and ventral retina, respectively. However, the characteristics of their visual environment that likely have driven these adaptations are rarely considered. Here, we built a UV-green-sensitive camera to record footage from mouse habitats. This footage is publicly available as a resource for mouse vision research. We found chromatic contrast to greatly diverge in the upper, but not the lower, visual field. Moreover, training a convolutional autoencoder on upper, but not lower, visual field scenes was sufficient for the emergence of color-opponent filters, suggesting that this environmental difference might have driven superior chromatic opponency in the ventral mouse retina, supporting color discrimination in the upper visual field. Furthermore, the upper visual field was biased toward dark UV contrasts, paralleled by more light-offset-sensitive ganglion cells in the ventral retina. Finally, footage recorded at twilight suggests that UV promotes aerial predator detection. Our findings support that natural scene statistics shaped early visual processing in evolution.

Vision: How Mice Control Their View.

Across vertebrates, eye movements serve the dual purpose of image stabilization during head or body movement, and gaze relocation. A new study has measured head and bilateral eye movements in freely moving mice, providing a detailed characterization of dynamic gaze behavior.

Estimation of self-motion duration and distance in rodents.

Spatial orientation and navigation rely on information about landmarks and self-motion cues gained from multi-sensory sources. In this study, we focused on self-motion and examined the capability of rodents to extract and make use of information about own movement, i.e. path integration. Path integration has been investigated in depth in insects and humans. Demonstrations in rodents, however, mostly stem from experiments on heading direction; less is known about distance estimation. We introduce a novel behavioural paradigm that allows for probing temporal and spatial contributions to path integration. The paradigm is a bisection task comprising movement in a virtual reality environment in combination with either timing the duration ran or estimating the distance covered. We performed experiments with Mongolian gerbils and could show that the animals can keep track of time and distance during spatial navigation.