Cholinergic potentiation of visual perception and vision restoration in rodents and humans

Mesoscopic Mapping of Stimulus-Selective Response Plasticity in the Visual Pathways Modulated by the Cholinergic System

“…These results are also concomitant with a recent human study showing that DPZ administration reduces the ocular dominance shift normally observed after a monocular deprivation (Sheynin et al, 2019 ) and reduce interocular suppression (Sheynin et al, 2020 ). Knowing that the binocular response is influenced by multiple factors such as the thalamocortical input from both eyes, the GABAergic modulation, and the corticocortical projections, it might be further explained by the influence of ACh on each of these factors (Disney et al, 2012 ; Groleau et al, 2015 ; Vaucher et al, 2019 ). This result may reflect the modification in perceptual strength in the conditioned eye over the other in the binocular region as observed in a monocular deprivation experiment (Scholl et al, 2017 ).…”

“…In the visual pathway, stimulus-specific response potentiation in V1 has been shown to involve gamma oscillations, the GABAergic microcircuits, and long-term potentiation of the response according to an Hebbian pattern (Cooke and Bear, 2010 ; Chen N. et al, 2012 ). It has also been shown to be enhanced by the cholinergic system (Kilgard and Merzenich, 1998 ; Rokem and Silver, 2013 ; Chen et al, 2015 ; Galuske et al, 2019 ; Vaucher et al, 2019 ), which strongly interacts with both the cortical GABAergic and glutamatergic microcircuits, inducing long-term potentiation-like mechanisms and refining circuitry efficiency. For these reasons, the cholinergic system has been proposed to be a key player in experience-induced plasticity.…”

Mesoscopic cortical network reorganization during recovery of optic nerve injury in GCaMP6s mice

“…Recovery of vision after damage to the visual pathway in adults can happen both spontaneously and following a visual training, as long as there is still some residual vision [1][2][3] . After an optic nerve injury, for example, when retinal ganglion cells or their axons degenerate, some residual optic nerve fibers still connect to the superior colliculus and lateral geniculate nucleus of the thalamus [4][5][6] .…”