Triggering eye movements in mice to understand stable visual perception

Abstract

Our project is motivated by the question of how the brain suppresses perception sometimes. Specifically, during motion signals of motion that we voluntarily generate with our eyes. To have a model for answering this question, we first need to reliably elicit these voluntary eye movements. Presenting a drifting grating, the Felsen and Poleg‐Polsky labs did that in mice except the eye movements were involuntary. Presenting a moving center that radiates dots, other scientists did that in primates and the eye movements were voluntary. We want the same stimulus to work on mice because they’re more ethical subjects. Therefore, we hypothesized that that a mice‐adapted stimulus would work on mice. We discovered that the moving center of our stimulus elicited eye movements. Next, we discovered the moving center of the stimulus elicited involuntary eye movements. Next, we discovered the moving center of the stimulus elicited more eye movements when on the left side of the screen. Since this came from expanding dots, a next step should be to try contracting dots. Ultimately, our data doesn't support the hypothesis that our mice‐adapted optic flow stimulus would elicit voluntary eye movements. We could expect difficulty in eliciting voluntary eye movements in mice because they have such large field of vision and spread out photoreceptors that they may not need voluntary eye movements. Our results were relevant because they say something about the potential of mice as models to understand how we make sense of a moving world when we ourselves move in it.