Visual uncertainty and task demands shape active sensing strategies in mice

In natural environments, animals actively sample visual information to guide their behavior. Sensory feedback is dynamic and often requires active movements, whether saccading across the lines of this page or walking through a park. From high-acuity vision in hawks to low-acuity vision in mice, many animals actively navigate to seek information, which can be called infotaxis. Although mice have relatively low-acuity vision, they still rely on sight for critical behaviors including navigation and prey capture. Yet how sensitive they are to visual information and whether they perform infotaxis has not been established. Here, we develop a virtual-reality object-discrimination task to investigate visual decision-making under naturalistic conditions. We show that mice perform infotaxis by actively seeking out informative views to guide their choices. Stimulus manipulations confirm that this strategy is modulated by the amount of available visual information. These results reveal that mice use principled active strategies to resolve visual uncertainty, thus highlighting a key role for information-seeking in natural vision.