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 reveals rodent intelligence. Akin to humans shaking a computer mouse to find the cursor on a screen, we show that head-fixed 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 stimulus during low visual stimulus contrast trials. When animals wiggle, the low visual stimulus contrast accuracy increases by 6.0% (Pearson correlation, r=0.900, p=0.038, N=5 group means computed from 213 mice). Moreover, mice wiggle the wheel at a speed that corresponds to a visual stimulus temporal frequency (11.52 ± 2.45 Hz) demonstrated to maximize contrast sensitivity in a Go/No-Go task (Umino et al, 2018). These findings suggest that mice wiggle a wheel to boost the salience of low visual contrast stimuli.