(Sept. 25) – The first study in the world that shows how fish see the illusion of movement as humans is entirely Italian. The prestigious international journal “Scientific Reports” of the Nature Publishing Group recently published an article entitled “Do fish perceive illusory motion?” The paper demonstrates that fish respond to illusory movement in a very similar manner to their response to real movement, thus suggesting that these animals possess a visual system with similar active processes to human ones. The article unveils new scenarios for the study of diseases linked to visual deficits. The paper was authored by a research team at the University of Padua, composed by Simone Gori (of the Developmental and Cognitive Neuroscience Lab, Department of General Psychology, and scientific advisor to the IRCCS “Eugenio Medea” of Lecco) and Cristiano Agrillo, Marco Dadda and Bisazza Angelo, all researchers within the Comparative Psychology Research Group of the Department of General Psychology. These results open new perspectives in several directions: there is clear evidence of how different visual systems have evolved reaching somewhat similar results; it paves the way for a new area of research in the study of visual system through the development of animal models; and it could lead to new developments in research that focuses on pathologies in which the visual system has been shown to be deficient in some way, as is the case for dyslexia or disorders on the autism spectrum. (red)
