Mice Use Visual Infotaxis

A team of scientists led by Mackenzie Weygandt Mathis at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne has demonstrated that mice actively employ visual infotaxis, a strategy where animals move strategically to maximize visual information. Using a custom-built virtual reality system, researchers showed that mice adjust their movements to seek better views of partially hidden objects, a behavior that scales with the amount of visual information available. This challenges previous assumptions that mice rely more on other senses due to their low visual acuity. The findings, published in Current Biology, suggest a deeper understanding of how seeing and moving are coordinated in the brain and the platform used has been made open source for future studies. Several other universities, including Baylor College of Medicine, Stanford University, and Carnegie Mellon University, contributed to this research.