The same visual system for all primates

The gray mouse lemur, the smallest species of primates, has excellent vision. More than one fifth of his cerebral cortex is dedicated to visual processing in order to accommodate a sufficient number of pixel processing units. UNIGE/Huber - The world's smallest primate reveals the incredible preservation of our visual system through millions of years of evolution. Primates process visual information in front of their eyes, similar to pixels in a digital camera, using small computing units located in the visual cortex of their brains. In order to understand the origins of our visual abilities, scientists at the University of Geneva , in collaboration with the Max Planck Institute in Göttingen and the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, have now investigated whether these computational units scale across the large differences in size between primates. The gray mouse lemur ( microcebus murinus ) from Madagascar is one of the smallest of them and weighs barely 60 grams. In a study published in the journal Current Biology , the scientists compared the visual system of the mouse lemur to that of other primates and found that the size of these visual processing units is identical in all primates, independent of their body size.