New preprint on head and eye movements in mice

New collaborative work with John O’Keefe (SWC, London) and Jasper Poort (University of Cambridge, UK) on head and eye movements in mice:

Meyer AF, O’Keefe J, Poort J. Two distinct types of eye-head coupling in freely moving mice. bioRxiv, 2020.

The mouse has become one of the most prominent species in vision research, in part because enormous progress has been made in the last few years in developing new tools to monitor and manipulate neural activity in mice and to model human disease. However, how the freely-moving mouse uses eye and head movements to actively explore its environment is largely unknown.

To answer this outstanding question, in this study we capitalized on a new technique (Meyer et al., Neuron (2018)) that allowed us to simultaneously track both eyes together with head movements in freely-moving mice. We find that most eye movements in mice are coupled to the head in two distinct ways associated with two different functions. By performing similar experiments in humans, we show that one of the couplings resembles a major characteristic of human eye movements (known as “saccade and fixate”).

See also Jasper’s tweet with example videos.