Ecological Visual Processing in the Mouse

Visual systems evolved to extract behaviorally relevant information while animals move through and interact with their world. Such ecological vision differs fundamentally from standard laboratory paradigms in many key aspects, making this a much harder problem for the brain to solve, and for the neuroscientist to study. However, emerging technologies and experimental approaches have enabled investigation of visual computations under these ecological conditions. These approaches are particularly powerful in the mouse, combining well-developed genetic tools, high-throughput recordings, and quantifiable ethological tasks. Here we review computations that are engaged in ecological contexts, including active sensing, motion processing, scene analysis, distance estimation, and spatial perception. We delineate experimental approaches that engage these computations and synthesize current understanding of their neural implementations based on mouse research. These studies reveal how ecological vision engages distinct processing strategies and novel neural circuitry, while highlighting the vast territory that remains unexplored in understanding real-world visual computation.