MouseDepthPrey · The role of depth perception during prey capture in the mouse

The role of depth perception during prey capture in the mouse

The mechanisms for the generation of depth perception at a neural level are largely unknown. There have been advances made on many model organisms, from the praying mantis to humans, but there is still a large body of knowledge missing. In particular, it is still unknown how the many sources of depth information present in our visual world lead to a unified percept of depth. It is also unclear where this happens in the brain, and what are the time constants and stages involved. In this Action, our aim was to shed light into these unknowns by utilizing the mouse as a model organism, and prey capture as a behavior that involves this capacity of the brain. Depth perception is a salient and relevant part of our vision, allowing us to turn the 2-dimensional images reaching our eyes into a 3-dimensional percept, which is essential for properly navigating it given space is 3-dimensional. Therefore, when neurological disorders prevent the perception of 3 dimensions, or when attempting to recreate 3-dimensionality artificially in displays for remote work for example, it is essential to understand how depth perception works and how to provide the brain with enough cues to generate it. As home-office and remote working platforms become more widespread, this will become and essential problem to solve. The study of depth perception requires the use of a model system. We have chosen the house mouse, as it offers the best compromise between being a visual organism and having a large array of methodologies developed to study it at the behavioral and neural level. To be able to extract depth perception information from the animal, we decided to utilize an innate behavior that requires the mouse to see in depth, as this would circumvent the use of training paradigms that would further complicate the experimental design. Our behavior of choice is prey capture, as it has been shown that mice readily hunt crickets even without training, and rely mostly on vision for this. Given the animal needs to estimate prey position in real time, we hypothesized depth perception would be essential for effective prey capture. Therefore, the overall objectives of this Action are to first develop an assay that allows mice to perform prey capture in a virtual setting. Once this is established, we will use this assay to perturb the different sources of depth information during prey capture and measure their effect. Finally, we will use this knowledge to inform the interpretation of the neural correlates of these sources and therefore identify where, when and how is the depth percept generated in the mouse brain.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз