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Authors & Affiliations
Verena Peterreins, Magdalena Kautzky, Yongrong Qiu, Zhijian Zhao, Ann Kotkat, Steffen Katzner, Felix Schneider-Soupiadis, Thomas Euler, Laura Busse
Abstract
Investigating vision through naturalistic stimuli holds great promise, because the visual system of any animal species is adapted to its ecological niche. In mice, such adaptations include a field of view exceeding 300° and cone opsins sensitive to UV and green light. These adaptations, however, cannot be probed with standard consumer displays.To present naturalistic stimuli with respect to coverage, color, and content to mice, we built a hemispheric dome setup, enabling the controlled projection of wide-field movies with UV-green spectral content. For our UV-green projection, we used a customized light engine with external high-power LEDs. We mitigated spatial distortions introduced by the projection through a geometry-independent calibration procedure. We adapted a head-mounted eye tracking system to capture behavioral responses of head-fixed mice viewing these stimuli. We validated our setup by quantifying the pupillary light reflex to uniform stimuli and the optokinetic reflex to drifting gratings. Finally, in experiments with naturalistic movies, we investigated whether mice showed differential saccades and eye positions based on visual input. Comparing naturalistic movies to a uniform screen control condition, we observed that although head-fixed mice did not make targeted saccades during movies, their overall eye position consistently shifted towards more frontal regions of visual space. This indicates that mice adjust their eye position in a stimulus-dependent way, potentially to optimize visual processing of information ahead in the visual field.Together, our results highlight the utility of our setup for in vivo studies of the mouse visual system with more naturalistic visual stimulation.