Animals use visual information to recognize the value of objects and respond with different behaviours, such as evasion or approach. While rodents show defensive behaviour toward an artificial looming stimulus that mimics an approaching avian predator, the visual feature that attracts them to targets with positive value, such as prey, remains unclear. Here, we reveal that rats show curiosity-related behaviours towards a virtual object on screen when it moves interactively with their movements, whereas they show less response to a static object, a regularly moving object, or interactive dislocation of the background. To mimic evading prey, we programmed the object to shrink when touched. Rats preferentially responded to interactive shrinking over interactive enlargement. These results suggest that rats exhibit a selective response to interactive objects. This would seem to be an efficient strategy for finding optimal prey using the evolutionarily conserved prey-predator relationship.

动物使用视觉信息来识别物体的价值并以不同的行为做出反应，例如逃避或接近。虽然啮齿动物对模仿接近的鸟类捕食者的人工迫近刺激表现出防御行为，但将它们吸引到具有积极价值的目标（例如猎物）的视觉特征仍不清楚。在这里，我们揭示了当老鼠与他们的动作交互移动时，老鼠对屏幕上的虚拟物体表现出与好奇心相关的行为，而它们对静态物体、有规律移动的物体或背景的交互式错位反应较少。为了模仿躲避猎物，我们将物体编程为在触摸时缩小。与交互放大相比，大鼠优先响应交互收缩。这些结果表明大鼠对交互对象表现出选择性反应。这似乎是使用进化上保守的猎物-捕食者关系寻找最佳猎物的有效策略。