Methodological Approaches to the Behavioural Investigation of Visual Perception in Rodents

Zoccolan, Davide; Filippo, Alessandro Di

doi:10.1016/b978-0-12-812012-5.00005-7

Cited by 7 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 288 publications

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“…One limitation of touchscreens is that it is difficult to control factors like viewing angle and position. A solution is to use a design where the rodent's head is semi‐fixed 69,120 . In this design, rats view a computer monitor by placing their head through a small hole in the wall of an operant chamber.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Category learning in rodents using touchscreen‐based tasks

Broschard

Kim

Love

et al. 2020

Genes Brain and Behavior

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Categorization is a fundamental cognitive function that organizes our experiences into meaningful “chunks.” This category knowledge can then be generalized to novel stimuli and situations. Multiple clinical populations, including people with Parkinson's disease, amnesia, autism, ADHD and schizophrenia, have impairments in the acquisition and use of categories. Although rodent research is well suited for examining the neural mechanisms underlying cognitive functions, many rodent cognitive tasks have limited translational value. To bridge this gap, we use touchscreens to permit greater flexibility in stimulus presentation and task design, track key dependent measures, and minimize experimenter involvement. Touchscreens offer a valuable tool for creating rodent cognitive tasks that are directly comparable to tasks used with humans. Touchscreen tasks are also readily used with cutting‐edge neuroscientific methods that are difficult to do in humans such as optogenetics, chemogenetics, neurophysiology and calcium imaging (using miniscopes). In this review, we show advantages of touchscreen‐based tasks for studying category learning in rats. We also address multiple factors for consideration when designing category learning tasks, including the limitations of the rodent visual system, experimental design, and analysis strategies.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Category learning in rodents using touchscreen‐based tasks

Broschard

Kim

Love

et al. 2020

Genes Brain and Behavior

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“…The behavioral rig consisted of two racks, each equipped with three operant boxes to allow training a batch of six rats simultaneously (Zoccolan, 2015;Zoccolan and Di Filippo, 2018).…”

Section: Behavioral Apparatus and Visual Stimulimentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The behavioral rig consisted of two racks, each equipped with three operant boxes to allow training a batch of six rats simultaneously (15,28). In each box, one of the walls bore a 3 cmdiameter hole, so that a rat could extend its head outside the box and face the stimulus display (a LCD monitor ASUS® Ve228 located at 30 cm from the viewing hole).…”

Section: Behavioral Apparatus and Visual Stimulimentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Our study was designed to address this question and provide a thorough psychophysical assessment of rat ability to spontaneously perceive the global direction of drifting plaids. To this aim, we relied on a visual priming paradigm (Tafazoli et al, 2012;Zoccolan and Di Filippo, 2018) that allowed measuring the perceptual similarity between gratings and plaids with the same global direction, without explicitly training the animals to associate these stimuli to the same response category.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Critically, this prevented assessing the spontaneous, purely perceptual motion integration abilities of naïve rodents. In fact, if feedback (e.g., reward) is provided to an animal about the outcome of his perceptual choices, it may learn to associate a given stimulus to a given response category without necessarily perceiving the sensory quality that the investigator intends to associate to that category (Tafazoli et al, 2012;Zoccolan, 2015;Zoccolan and Di Filippo, 2018). It would thus be impossible to infer from such kind of experiments whether the choices of the animal are driven by a general-purpose representation of global motion direction at the level of visual cortex (as the one found in monkey MT), or by the ability to learn abstract representations of arbitrary stimulus categories in higher-order association areas involved in perceptual decision making, such as posterior parietal cortex (PPC) (Raposo et al, 2014;Licata et al, 2017;Nikbakht et al, 2018;Odoemene et al, 2018).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Rats spontaneously perceive global motion direction of drifting plaids

Matteucci

Zattera

Marotti

et al. 2021

Preprint

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Computing global motion direction of extended visual objects is a hallmark of primate high-level vision. Although neurons selective for global motion have also been found in mouse visual cortex, we still do not know whether rodents can combine multiple motion signals into global, integrated percepts. Here, we trained two groups of rats to discriminate motion direction of either gratings or plaids (i.e., superpositions of two gratings) and we tested whether these visual patterns were able to prime rat perception consistently with an integrated representation of plaid direction. We found that, depending on the identity of the training stimuli, rats displayed either a shared representation of gratings and plaids based on global motion, or a non-shared one. As shown by computational modeling, these findings are consistent with the existence of a population of pattern-like cells, playing a functional role similar to that demonstrated in primates.

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