Probing the capabilities and limits of biological vision is one of the fundamental goals of visual neuroscience. Since its foundation, our lab has pursued this goal using a variety of psychophysical tools, including visual priming and classification image approaches, pioneering the study of rat visual cognition. Our work has shown that rats can:
- recognize visual objects despite substantial changes in their appearance (Zoccolan et al., 2009; Tafazoli et al., 2012), using advanced, multifeatural shape processing strategies (Alemi-Neissi et al., 2013; Rosselli et al., 2015; Djurdjevic et al., 2018; Muratore et al, 2025)
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Integrate visual information with inputs from other modalities (e.g., tactile and auditory) to guide perceptual choices (Nikbakht et al., 2018; Zanzi et al, 2025)
- perceive global motion direction of complex visual patterns (Matteucci et al., 2021)
- discriminate visual textures defined by multi-point correlations, displaying the same pattern of sensitivity found in human participants and predicted by the efficient coding principle (Caramellino et al., 2021)
Through collaborations with other labs, we are also contributing to test visual and cognitive abilities in humans and other species. Work on this front includes the following findings:
- a general-purpose mechanism based on the statistical learning governs visual feature association in visual word identification and visual object recognition (Vidal et al., 2021)
- naive, newly hatched chicks display the same preferences for textures defined by multi-point correlations as those found in humans and rats (Zanon et al., 2026)
See below for a complete list of our behavioral studies.