Search research articles

ABOUT JoVE

Overview Leadership Blog JoVE Help Center

AUTHORS

Publishing Process Editorial Board Scope & Policies Peer Review FAQ Submit

LIBRARIANS

Testimonials Subscriptions Access Resources Library Advisory Board FAQ

RESEARCH

JoVE Journal Methods Collections JoVE Encyclopedia of Experiments Archive

EDUCATION

JoVE Core JoVE Business JoVE Science Education JoVE Lab Manual Faculty Resource Center Faculty Site

Terms & Conditions of Use

Related Concept Videos

Instinctive Drift

Instinctive Drift

Instinctive drift refers to the tendency of animals to revert to their innate behaviors despite repeated reinforcement. Breland and Breland demonstrated this concept in an experiment with a raccoon. The raccoon was trained to pick up two coins and place them in a container in exchange for food. Initially, the raccoon learned to associate the coins with food, making them a conditioned stimulus or a substitute for food. However, over time, the raccoon became less willing to put the coins into the...

You might also read

Related Articles

Articles linked to this work by shared authors, journal, and citation graph.

Sort by

Same author

Low-dimensional and optimised representations of high-level information in the expert brain.

Nature communications·2026

Same author

Tracing aesthetic experience from perception and conception to appraisal using deep convolutional neural networks.

iScience·2026

Same author

Can Category-selective Cortex Predict Categorization Behavior?

Journal of cognitive neuroscience·2026

Same author

Rethinking neuroaesthetics: Toward a multidimensional and integrative science of aesthetic experience.

Neuron·2026

Same author

Connecting the dots: Similar visual orthographic acquisition for Braille or line junctions.

Psychonomic bulletin & review·2026

Same author

Investigating action topography in visual cortex and deep artificial neural networks.

Nature communications·2025

Same journal

AI-generated faces are becoming more trustworthy.

Journal of vision·2026

Same journal

Attenuated boundary extension in observer perspective memory compared to field perspective memory.

Journal of vision·2026

Same journal

Comparing masking and habituation roles in saccadic omission of stimuli optimized for intra-saccadic vision.

Journal of vision·2026

Same journal

Analysis of human visual experience data.

Journal of vision·2026

Same journal

Pyramid-based Bayesian modeling for high-resolution behavioral analysis.

Journal of vision·2026

Same journal

Sensation without perception: The white whale effect and perceptual blindness in autonomous vehicles.

Journal of vision·2026

See all related articles

Search research articles

Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jan 2, 2026

A Within-Subject Experimental Design using an Object Location Task in Rats

A Within-Subject Experimental Design using an Object Location Task in Rats

Published on: May 6, 2021

Face categorization and behavioral templates in rats.

Anna Elisabeth Schnell^1,2, Gert Van den Bergh^1,2, Ben Vermaercke^1,2

¹Laboratory of Biological Psychology, University of Leuven (KU Leuven), Leuven, Belgium.

Journal of Vision

|December 12, 2019

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Rats demonstrate complex visual categorization, successfully identifying faces and generalizing to new examples. Their visual processing shows a bias towards upper-left stimuli, expanding understanding of rodent vision science.

More Related Videos

A Fully Automated Rodent Conditioning Protocol for Sensorimotor Integration and Cognitive Control Experiments

A Fully Automated Rodent Conditioning Protocol for Sensorimotor Integration and Cognitive Control Experiments

Published on: April 15, 2014

Behavioral Tasks for Examining Identity Recognition In Mice

Behavioral Tasks for Examining Identity Recognition In Mice

Published on: February 7, 2025

Related Experiment Videos

Last Updated: Jan 2, 2026

A Within-Subject Experimental Design using an Object Location Task in Rats

A Within-Subject Experimental Design using an Object Location Task in Rats

Published on: May 6, 2021

A Fully Automated Rodent Conditioning Protocol for Sensorimotor Integration and Cognitive Control Experiments

A Fully Automated Rodent Conditioning Protocol for Sensorimotor Integration and Cognitive Control Experiments

Published on: April 15, 2014

Behavioral Tasks for Examining Identity Recognition In Mice

Behavioral Tasks for Examining Identity Recognition In Mice

Published on: February 7, 2025

Area of Science:

Vision science
Comparative cognition
Neuroscience

Background:

Rodents are increasingly used in vision science research.
Understanding rodent complex visual task performance relative to primates is limited.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate rats' capacity for face categorization and generalization.
To determine the behavioral templates underlying rat visual processing using the Bubbles paradigm.

Main Methods:

Training rats on a face categorization task.
Utilizing the Bubbles paradigm to identify visual processing strategies.
Testing performance with modified stimuli (upside-down, contrast-inverted).

Main Results:

Rats successfully categorized faces and generalized to novel exemplars.
Performance remained above chance despite stimulus modifications.
Behavioral templates showed overlap with pixel-based models, with an upper-left bias.

Conclusions:

Rats possess sophisticated face categorization abilities.
These findings enhance the understanding of rodent visual perception and complex task learning.
Rodent models offer valuable insights into visual processing mechanisms relevant to comparative cognition.