Mice wiggle a wheel to boost the salience of low visual contrast stimuli

From the Welsh tidy mouse to the New York City pizza rat, movement belies rodent intelligence. Akin to humans shaking a computer mouse to find the cursor on a screen, we show that mice develop an active sensing strategy in a visual perceptual decision-making task (The International Brian Laboratory, 2021). We demonstrate that mice wiggle a wheel that controls the movement of a visual stimulus during low contrast trials (6.25\%). Across N = 213 mice, we show that the low visual contrast accuracy increases by 9.0\% as wiggling increases. Moreover, mice wiggle the wheel at the temporal frequency (12 Hz) optimal for their visual systems (Umino et al, 2018). Thus, these findings suggest that mice wiggle the wheel to boost the salience of low visual contrast stimuli.