Mice (Mus musculus) do not perceive emergent gestalt.

Abstract

We have previously demonstrated that chimpanzees, similar to humans, can discriminate the orientations of a diagonal line better when lines are presented in redundant contexts than alone.In the present study, we examined whether the same redundant context facilitated diagonalorientation discrimination in mice. Mice were presented one of three simultaneous, diagonalorientation discrimination tasks: (a) presented alone, (b) presented with the context that resulted in emergent configurations in chimpanzees and humans, and (c) presented with the context not resulting in emergent configurations in chimpanzees or humans. In contrast to the facilitative effect of congruent context in chimpanzees and humans, the identical context did not facilitate the discrimination of the diagonal orientation in mice. This finding suggests that mice, unlike chimpanzees and humans, do not perceive emergent Gestalt.

Comparative cognition—Conceptual and methodological advancements.

“…The next set of papers focusses on perceptual processing mechanisms in different species. The paper by Goto and Watanabe (2021) explores whether the mouse visual system is sensitive to Gestalt principles, using operant discrimination learning tasks similar to those used previously to document Gestalt processing in chimpanzees and humans. Qadri and Cook (2021) use the innovative approach of “adaptive genetic algorithms” to assess the relative importance of different features of a stimulus in controlling organisms’ discrimination learning performance.…”