Predator vs prey eye placement4/12/2024 ![]() This region also allowed the least motion-induced image blur when the animals were running forward. During the pursuit, the cricket’s position was mainly held in a small area of the mouse’s view that corresponds to a specialized region in the eye which is thought to help track objects. If the insect escaped, the mice repeated that behavior. This revealed that, once a cricket had entered any part of the mice’s large field of view, the rodents shifted their head – but not their eyes – to bring the prey into both eye views, and then ran directly at it. Combining this information allowed the team to mathematically recreate what mice would see as they chased the insects, and to assess what part of their large visual field they were using. developed a new technique to record the precise eye positions, head rotations and prey location of mice hunting crickets in surroundings that were fully digitized at high resolution. This is difficult to investigate, since it requires simultaneously measuring the eye and head movements of mice as they chase and capture insects. This raises the question: what part of their large visual field of view do these rodents use when tracking a prey, and to what advantage? To stabilize their gaze when they are on the prowl, mice reflexively move their eyes to counter the movement of their head: in fact, they are unable to move their eyes independently. To do this, they are helped by their large panoramic field of vision, which stretches from behind and over their heads to below their snouts. To survive, they need to dodge predators looming on land and from the skies, while also hunting down the small insects that are part of their diet. The functional focus lies in the upper-temporal part of the retina and coincides with the reported high density-region of Alpha-ON sustained retinal ganglion cells. ![]() This functional focus coincides with the region of minimal optic flow within the visual field and consequently area of minimal motion-induced image-blur, as during pursuit mice ran directly toward the prey. By quantifying the spatial location of objects in the visual scene and their motion throughout the behavior, we show that the prey image consistently falls within a small area of the VOR-stabilized visual field. By isolating the visual sense and combining a mouse eye optic model with the head and eye rotations, the detailed reconstruction of the digital environment and retinal features were projected onto the corneal surface for comparison, and updated throughout the behavior. ![]() ![]() Here, we developed a method to digitally reconstruct and quantify the visual scene of freely moving mice performing a visually based prey capture task. However, in the freely moving animal quantifying object location in the field of view is challenging. While maintaining their extensive visual coverage is advantageous for predator detection, mice also track and capture prey using vision. Mice have a large visual field that is constantly stabilized by vestibular ocular reflex (VOR) driven eye rotations that counter head-rotations. ![]()
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