Probing the capabilities and limits of biological vision is one of the fundamental goals of visual neuroscience. Since its foundation, our lab has pursued this goal using a variety of psychophysical tools, including visual priming and classification image approaches, pioneering the study of rat visual cognition. Our work has shown that rats can:

• recognize visual objects despite substantial changes in their appearance (Zoccolan et al., 2009; Tafazoli et al., 2012), using advanced, multifeatural shape processing strategies (Alemi-Neissi et al., 2013; Rosselli et al., 2015; Djurdjevic et al., 2018; Muratore et al, 2024)
• integrate visual and tactile information to optimally process oriented patterns (Nikbakht et al., 2018)
• perceive global motion direction of complex visual patterns (Matteucci et al., 2021)
• discriminate visual textures defined by multi-point correlations, displaying the same pattern of sensitivity found in human participants and predicted by the efficient coding principle (Caramellino et al., 2021)

See below for a complete list of our behavioral studies.