Spontaneous Discriminative Response to the Biological Motion Displays Involving a Walking Conspecific in Mice

Recent translational studies using mice have contributed toward elucidating the neural, genetic, and molecular basis of social communication deficits. Nevertheless, many components of visual processes underlying mice sociality remain unresolved, including perception of bodily-movement. Here, we aimed to reveal the visual sensitivity of mice to information on bodily motion using biological motion displays depicted by simple geometric dots. We introduced biological motions extracted from walking mice vs. corresponding meaningless scrambled motions, in which the spatial configurations of each path of dots were shuffled. The apparatus was a three-chambered box with an opening between the chambers, and each side chamber had a monitor. We measured the exploration time of mice within the apparatus during the test, with two types of displays being presented. Mice spent more time in the chamber with the scrambled motion displays, indicating that animals spontaneously discriminated stimuli, with the scrambled motion being relatively novel. Furthermore, mice might have detected socially familiar cues from the biological motion displays. Subsequent testing revealed that additional mice showed no bias to the static versions of the stimuli used in the Movie test. Thus, we confirmed that mice modulated their behavior by focusing on the motion information of the stimuli, rather than the spatial configurations of each dot. Our findings provide a new perspective on how visual processing contributes to underlying social behavior in mice, potentially facilitating future translational studies of social deficits with respect to genetic and neural bases.