Department of Psychology, Queen's University, Kingston, ON, K7L 3N6, Canada.
Exp Brain Res. 2010 Sep;205(4):571-6. doi: 10.1007/s00221-010-2378-0. Epub 2010 Aug 3.
It is unknown whether the rodent visual system can perceive biological motion, an ability present in primates, cats, and several bird species. Using a water-maze visual discrimination task, we find that rats can be trained to distinguish between left- and rightward motion of abstract point-light displays of walking humans. However, rats were unable to generalize to a novel point-light display (a walking cat), or to a display of a backward walking human, where overall body configuration and local, ballistic foot motion provide directly opposing cues regarding movement direction. Together, these experiments provide the first demonstration of the ability of rodents to extract motion direction cues from abstract, point-light displays. However, when isolated, neither the overall body configuration nor the local motion of the feet appears to provide sufficient information for rats to reliably extract movement direction in biological motion displays.
目前尚不清楚啮齿动物的视觉系统是否能够感知生物运动，而这种能力存在于灵长类动物、猫科动物和几种鸟类中。通过使用水迷宫视觉辨别任务，我们发现可以训练老鼠区分抽象的光点显示的人类左右移动。然而，老鼠无法将其推广到新的光点显示（即行走的猫），也无法推广到显示反向行走的人类，在这种情况下，整体身体结构和局部弹道足部运动提供了关于运动方向的直接相反线索。这些实验共同首次证明了啮齿动物能够从抽象的点光源显示中提取运动方向线索的能力。然而，当孤立地看时，无论是整体身体结构还是脚部的局部运动都似乎不足以让老鼠在生物运动显示中可靠地提取运动方向。
