A flexible Python-based touchscreen chamber for operant conditioning reveals improved visual perception of cardinal orientations in mice.

ABSTRACT: Natural scenes are composed of a wide range of edge angles and spatial frequencies, with a strong overrepresentation of vertical and horizontal edges. Correspondingly, many mammalian species are much better at discriminating these cardinal orientations compared to obliques. A potential reason for this increased performance could be an increased number of neurons in the visual cortex that are tuned to cardinal orientations, which is likely to be an adaptation to the natural scene statistics. Such biased angular tuning has recently been shown in the mouse primary visual cortex. However, it is still unknown if mice also show a perceptual dominance of cardinal orientations. Here, we describe the design of a novel custom-built touchscreen chamber that allows testing natural scene perception and

SUBMITTER: Wiesbrock C 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9588922 | biostudies-literature | 2022

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature