Vision guides directed orienting movements during obstacle avoidance in mice

Abstract In natural environments, animals must effectively maneuver around obstacles to reach goals such as food or shelter. Recent work has demonstrated that laboratory mice use vision for naturalistic behavior such as prey capture, escape, and distance estimation. However, it is unknown to what extent mice use vision relative to other senses such as touch for obstacle avoidance, a critical natural behavior. In this study we developed an obstacle avoidance task in freely moving mice to investigate how vision is used to guide paths around an obstacle obstructing a goal. We found that mice clearly use vision to avoid an obstacle, steering around the obstacle at distances where tactile information isn’t available. By comparing trajectories for mice performing obstacle avoidance in the light versus the dark, we found that vision contributes to more spatially efficient trajectories and paths directed to the open edge of the obstacle. When vision is available, mice make large orienting movements towards the opening of the obstacle at about 10 cm from its edge, suggesting that mice are actively using visual information to direct these movements. Finally, by occluding one eye, we found that mice were still able to avoid obstacles with primarily monocular information. Taken together, these results demonstrate that laboratory mice use vision to avoid an obstacle, taking directed paths that are initiated by large orienting movements. In addition to demonstrating the visual behavioral capabilities of the mouse, this paradigm can serve as a foundation to study the neural circuits that mediate visually guided orienting and locomotion. Highlights We developed a simple obstacle avoidance task for freely moving mice that requires minimal training Vision is necessary for efficient and directed paths around an obstacle Mice steer around obstacles by performing directed head movements towards clear paths Mice do not require binocular vision for obstacle avoidance