I think there is probably an anthropocentric flaw in the rat display.

Human eyes are side-by-side and forward, with a big binocular overlap and a clear vanishing point. A forward-facing curved screen fits that geometry well.

Rats' eyes, by contrast, are lateral. They have a much wider field of view, a tiny binocular zone, and use motion and contrast more than neat perspective lines. A single human-style "cinema screen" isn't laid out for a rat's optics or brain.

Perhaps if the scenes were rendered with a much wider, 250° FOV, it would help the rat understand what it was seeing better.

Or even rendered with two virtual cameras offset and angled apart, then stitch their outputs into one extra-wide view wrapped onto the curved display. That would approximate the rat’s much wider horizontal field of view and reduce the mismatch between where its eyes are actually looking and where the important visual information appears.

There are other differences in perception of color and motion, but fixing the FOV would be an immediate and relatively easy software fix.