Advanced artificial intelligence models can already churn out computer code and help discover new pharmaceuticals, but when it comes to identifying simple objects, they might still have something to learn from the humble rat. Those are the conclusions drawn from a paper published this week in the journal Patterns, where researchers from Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati (SISSA) in Italy tasked an image recognition model with trying to replicate rats' ability to recognize objects that were rotated, resized, and partially obscured. . The AI model was able to eventually match the rats' image processing capabilities, but only after using more and more resources and computer power to catch up. Though identifying objects in their original position was easy for both the AI and the rat, researchers had to boost the model's performance in order to match the rats processing capabilities when identifying objects that were altered in various ways. Researchers say their findings suggest that rat vision, fine-tuned over millions of years of evolution, is still more efficient than even powerful image recognition systems. Rat vision differs from the way humans see in several notable ways.