Motion Discrimination and the Motion Aftereffect in Mouse Vision

Abstract

Prolonged exposure to motion in one direction often leads to the illusion of motion in the opposite direction for stationary objects. This motion aftereffect likely arises across several visual areas from adaptive changes in the balance of activity and competitive interactions. We examined whether or not the mouse was susceptible to this same illusion to determine whether it would be a suitable model for learning about the neural representation of the motion aftereffect. Under a classical conditioning paradigm, mice learned to lick when presented with motion in one direction and not the opposite direction. When the mice were adapted to motion preceding this test, their lick behavior for zero coherence motion was biased for motion in the opposite direction of the adapting stimulus. Overall, lick count versus motion coherence shifted in the opposite direction of the adapting stimulus. This suggests that although the mouse has a simpler visual system compared with primates, it still is subject to the motion aftereffect and may elucidate the underlying circuitry.

Mice Discriminate Stereoscopic Surfaces Without Fixating in Depth

“…For two-photon microscopy, we used three adult mice (3-6 months of age) for GCaMP6f imaging: one male and two female C57BL/6J-Tg(Thy1-GCaMP6f)GP5.17Dkim/J mice that express GCamp6f under the Thy1 promoter (Dana et al, 2014). For alignment data during static stereoscopic stimuli, we used three female mice expressing ChR2 in PVϩ interneurons (Samonds et al, 2018a). To immobilize mice during experiments, a titanium bar was secured to the skull using dental acrylic under isoflurane anesthesia (1-3%).…”

“…Behavior. Mice were water restricted for 1 week before training with their weights maintained within 30% of the original body weight Samonds et al, 2018a) and before acclimating them to running on a floating Styrofoam ball while head-fixed (Dombeck et al, 2007). Mice were then trained to discriminate between two disparities of equal size, but opposite sign (Ϯ1.67°).…”

Indicators and Criteria of Consciousness in Animals and Intelligent Machines: An Inside-Out Approach

“…Further evidence for illusory percepts in mice comes from studies on the rubber tail illusion, which suggests that mice have a sense of body ownership (in this experiment, a mouse’s tail and a fake rubber tail were synchronously stroked, and when subsequently the rubber tail was grasped the mice responded as if their own tail was being touched; Wada et al, 2016). In addition, mice are prone to the motion aftereffect, an illusion of motion that arises after prolonged exposure to motion of an object in one direction (Samonds et al, 2018). Finally, mice have a capacity for amodal completion (Kanizsa et al, 1993), which does not offer evidence for illusion susceptibility per se but does argue for an ability to integrate information across large portions of the visual field in order to make inferences about occluded parts of objects.…”

Rats spontaneously perceive global motion direction of drifting plaids

“…Even if a few studies tested the ability of rats and mice to discriminate the dominant motion direction of random dot kinematograms [23][24][25][26][27] (RDKs: a task linked to motion integration, since it requires spatial pooling of local motion cues), no study has probed the ability of rodents to perceive and report global motion direction of plaids made of extended oriented elements (e.g., gratings) moving along different directions. Notably, although both motion discrimination tasks require some form of spatial integration, processing plaids constitutes a more stringent testing ground of high-level motion integration than processing RDKs.…”