Nonhuman primates are the main animal model to investigate high-level properties of human cortical vision. For one property, transformation-invariant object recognition, recent studies have revealed interesting and unknown capabilities in rats. Here we report on the ability of rats to rely upon second-order cues that are important to structure the incoming visual images into figure and background. Rats performed a visual shape discrimination task in which the shapes were not only defined by first-order luminance i…