Even mice themselves can track and capture insect prey such as crickets, despite not having a fovea. Think of a lion hunting a gazelle, for instance, or a cat stalking a mouse.

But the majority of mammals do not have a fovea, and yet are still able to track moving targets. When watching a bird fly across the sky, you can track its progress by moving your eyes to keep the bird in the center of your visual field, over the fovea. The same process works for tracking moving objects. This provides the detailed vision required for reading. When you move your eyes across a page, you keep the images of the words you are currently reading on the fovea. It relies on a specialized area of the retina called the fovea.

Central vision allows you to see objects in fine detail. Moving your eyes enables you to view each word using your central – as opposed to peripheral – vision. eLife digestĪs you read this sentence, your eyes will move automatically from one word to the next, while your head remains still. These findings relate eye movements in the mouse to other species, and provide a foundation for studying active vision during ethological behaviors in the mouse. Rather, orienting movements are driven by the head, with the eyes following in coordination to sequentially stabilize and recenter the gaze.

Notably, these saccades do not preferentially target the prey location. During movement, however, periods of stabilization are interspersed with non-compensatory saccades that abruptly shift gaze position. We found that the majority of eye movements are compensatory for head movements, thereby serving to stabilize the visual scene. To determine how mice target their gaze during natural behavior, we measured head and bilateral eye movements in mice performing prey capture, an ethological behavior that engages vision. Many studies of visual processing are conducted in constrained conditions such as head- and gaze-fixation, and therefore less is known about how animals actively acquire visual information in natural contexts.

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