Physiological consequences for the cat's visual cortex of effectively restricting early visual experience with oriented contours

Abstract

1. The early visual experience of nine cats was restricted to viewing horizontal or vertical lines inside opaque goggles. 2. When the kittens were 3-4 mo old, extracellular recordings were made in the primary visual cortex. To obtain a representative sample of cortical cells, units were studied at regularly spaced intervals along the course of electrode penetrations traveling oblique to the cortical surface. An automated assessment of preferred orientation using a computer-driven optical display was employed, and during the recording session the experimenters did not know which orientation(s) each animal had viewed in early life. 3. In the cats that viewed horizontal lines with one eye and vertical lines with the other during rearing, two major findings of previous workers (14) were confirmed. First, a majority of units were not selective for orientation. Second, units with preferred orientations near vertical tended to be activated exclusively by the eye that had viewed vertical, and likewise for horizontal. 4. In cats that viewed lines of the same orientation with both eyes during rearing, a substantially smaller proportion of units were selective for orientation; the preferred orientations of these units also tended to match the orientation to which the cats had been exposed. 5. Portions of some electrode penetrations showed an orderly arrangement of cells according to preferred orientation similar to that seen in normal cats, but with regions over which only nonselective cells were found. Many penetrations appeared less orderly. 6. The results are consistent with a role for early visual experience in maintaining the responsiveness and innate selectivity of cortical neurons, although they cannot entirely rule out the possibility that experience may alter or determine the preferred orientation of some cells.

The effect of horizontal‐plane environment on the development of binocular receptive fields of cells in cat visual cortex

“…Therefore, in these cats the maximal disparity increased, and reached fairly large angles towards the end of the rearing period, when the kittens' heads would sometimes touch the ceiling. Cooper, 1970;Hirsch & Spinelli, 1971;Stryker et al 1978). However, this hypothesis is difficult to reconcile with our data.…”

“…When kittens wore goggles in which they saw orthogonal lines with the two eyes (Leventhal & Hirsch, 1975; Stryker, Sherk, Leventhal & Hirsch, 1978), very few cells were found to be orientation selective in both eyes, although some of these had preferred orientations which roughly corresponded to the orientations the eyes had seen. When one or both eyes were rotated surgically (Blakemore, Van Sluyters, Peck & Hein, 1975;Yinon, 1975;Crewther, Crewther, Peck & Pettigrew, 1980) and normal visual experience was allowed, more binocular cells were preserved, but no cortical compensation was found.…”

Role for Visual Experience in the Development of Direction-Selective Circuits

“…Moreover, in young and dark-reared retinas the preferred directions of noncardinal ON and ON-OFF DSGCs remained stable in two consecutive imaging sessions ( Figure 3E). Thus non-cardinal tuning is not the result of broader tuning that would cause the preferred direction to be more variable [24], indicating vision-based clustering is not due to refinement of DSGC directional tuning. Furthermore, non-cardinal DSGCs exhibited the same velocity tuning as cardinal DSGCs in both in young and dark-reared mice ( Figures 3F and 3G).…”

The visual system of the cat

“…Of the minority of neurons which retained any orientation selectivity, there was a clear trend for a cortical cell driven by one eye to prefer the orientation experienced by that eye. This finding has subsequently been replicated by others (Blakemore, 1976;Gordon, Presson, Packwook, & Scheer, 1979;Pettigrew, Olson, & Hirsch, 1973;Stryker & Sherk, 1975;Stryker, Sherk, Leventhal, & Hirsch, 1978).…”