Not-so-blind mice can make strategic and acute visual choices

New research from the RIKEN Center for Brain Science shows that mice can teach us about decision-making strategies. Mice in the study autonomously trained themselves to make decisions about detailed pictures on a screen. A dataset of over 1.3 million viewings of black and white striped lines revealed that mice were highly sensitive to small differences in how slanted the lines were. This sensitivity allowed fine visual discriminations, which illuminated the underlying, sometimes random nature of the decisions. The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on July 27.