Decoding Color Vision in Mice: Insights into how they navigate their environment
Important insights on how color is coded in mouse V1
Researchers at the IOR in Tübingen (Chechen Cai, Sacha Sokoloski) together with Katrin Franke, Philip Berens & Andreas Savas Tolias and colleagues at the Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, USA (Kayla Ponder, Jiakun Fu), have provided in their joint publication important new insights into how colour is processed in the mouse brain, revealing the importance of colour vision for survival tasks such as the detection of aerial predators.
The study, conducted by this above mentioned team of neuroscientists, focuses on how colour information is represented in the mouse primary visual cortex (V1) - a key brain region responsible for processing visual information. The published findings could explain general principles of vision across species and help enhance our understanding of how different animals use colour information to guide their behaviour.
While it has long been known that mice can perceive colour, this new study provides a comprehensive view of how their brains discriminate between different hues. Mice are dichromatic, meaning they have two types of cone photoreceptors in their eyes, sensitive to ultraviolet (UV) light and green light. These photoreceptors scan different parts of the visual field, with UV cones mostly active in the upper field (sky) and green cones in the lower field (ground). Behavioural studies have shown that mice can discriminate colours, but this study is the first to explain how neurons in the visual cortex process this information.
The study shows that the mouse visual cortex is specialised, with different regions tuned to specific tasks, such as detecting aerial predators. This advances our understanding of colour vision in mice and provides a broader insight into how animals use colour information to navigate their environment. The findings also highlight the importance of colour processing in the mouse visual system and contribute to our understanding of how colour information is organised across species.
Link to the original full publication:
Katrin Franke, Chenchen Cai,Kayla Ponder, Jiakun Fu, Sacha Sokoloski, Philipp Berens, Andreas Savas Tolias “Asymmetric distribution of color-opponent response types across mouse visual cortex supports superior color vision in the sky”
