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Experience-dependent binocular competition in the visual cortex begins at eye opening

Nature Neuroscience volume 10, pages 370–375 (2007)Cite this article

Abstract

Visual experience begins at eye opening, but current models consider cortical circuitry to be resistant to experience-dependent competitive modification until the activation of a later critical period. Here we examine this idea using optical imaging to map the time course of receptive field refinement in normal mice, mice in which the contralateral eye never opens and mice in which the contralateral eye is silenced. We found that the refinement of ipsilateral eye retinotopy is retarded by contralateral deprivation, but accelerated by silencing of the contralateral eye. Patterned visual experience through the ipsilateral eye is required for this acceleration. These differences are most obvious at postnatal day 15, long before the start of the critical period, indicating that experience-dependent binocular plasticity occurs much earlier than was previously thought. Furthermore, these results suggest that the quality of activity, in terms of signal to noise, and not the quantity, determines robust receptive field development.

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Figure 1: Visual system of the mouse.
Figure 2: Time course of normal development of retinotopic maps in mouse visual cortex.
Figure 3: Contralateral deprivation retards the maturation of ipsilateral eye maps.
Figure 4: Removing or silencing the contralateral eye accelerates the maturation of ipsilateral eye maps.
Figure 5: Patterned visual experience is required for retinotopic map development.
Figure 6: Well-organized, low-scatter retinotopic maps can be detected even when the maximum response magnitude is low.

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Acknowledgements

We thank M. Stryker for suggesting the APB experiments and for helping to troubleshoot our imaging setup; E. Ruthazer for providing us with his enucleation protocol; and A. McGee, W. Thompson, J. Faguet, E. Ruthazer and M. Stryker for critically reading the manuscript. This work was supported by the US National Eye Institute, the Klingenstein Foundation and the Giannini Family Foundation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Neurobiology, University of California at Los Angeles, 695 Charles Young Drive South, Los Angeles, 90095-1761, California, USA

    Spencer L Smith & Joshua T Trachtenberg

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  1. Spencer L Smith
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  2. Joshua T Trachtenberg
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Contributions

S.L.S. conducted the experiments, wrote the computer code for image acquisition and analysis, conducted the data analyses and prepared the figures. J.T.T. conducted some of the experiments and supervised the project. S.L.S. and J.T.T. contributed equally to writing the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Joshua T Trachtenberg.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Smith, S., Trachtenberg, J. Experience-dependent binocular competition in the visual cortex begins at eye opening. Nat Neurosci 10, 370–375 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn1844

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