Rodents are emerging as increasingly popular models of visual functions. Yet, evidence that rodent visual cortex is capable of advanced visual processing, such as object recognition, is limited. In my seminar, I will describe the results of a recent study in which we have investigate how neurons located along the progression of extrastriate areas that, in the rat brain, run laterally to primary visual cortex, encode object information. We found a progressive functional specialization of neural responses along these areas, with: i) a gradual increase of receptive field size and response latency; ii) a sharp reduction of the amount of low-level, energy-related visual information encoded by neuronal firing; and iii) a substantial increase in the ability of single neurons to support discrimination of visual objects under identity-preserving transformations (e.g., position and size changes). These findings strongly argue for the existence of a rat object-processing pathway, and point to the rodents as promising models to dissect the neuronal circuitry underlying transformation-tolerant recognition of visual objects.