SHORT LEASH: Tethering a fly allows researchers to study the eye and body movements of the insect as it sees and responds to a virtual reality scene, which appears as a panorama or a solid bar.COURTESY OF MARK FRYE
Wandering through a maze with striped gray walls, a mouse searches for turns that will take it to a thirst-quenching reward. Although the maze seems real to the mouse, it is, in fact, a virtual world. Virtual reality (VR) has become a valuable tool to study brains and behaviors because researchers can precisely control sensory cues, correlating nerve-cell activity with specific actions. “It allows experiments that are not possible using real-world approaches,” neurobiologist Christopher Harvey of Harvard Medical School and colleagues wrote in 2016 in a commentary in Nature (533:324–25).
Studies of navigation are perfect examples. Extraneous sounds, smells, tastes, and textures, along with internal information about balance and spatial orientation, combine with visual cues to help a mouse move through a maze. In a ...
