Sensory and Multisensory Responses in the Newborn Monkey Superior Colliculus

By Mark T. Wallace, Barry E. Stein. 2001

141 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Superior colliculus (SC) neurons have the ability to synthesize information from different sensory modalities, resulting in enhancements (or depressions) of their activity. This physiological capacity is, in turn, closely tied to changes in overt attentive and orientation responses. The present study shows that, in contrast to more altricial species, many deep layer SC neurons in the rhesus monkey are multisensory at birth. Such neurons can respond to stimuli from different sensory modalities, and all convergence patterns seen in the adult are represented. Nevertheless, these neurons cannot yet synthesize their multisensory inputs. Rather, they respond to combinations of cross-modal stimuli much like they respond to their individual modality-specific components. This immature property of multisensory neurons is in contrast to many of the surprisingly sophisticated modality-specific response properties of these neurons and of their modality-specific neighbors. Thus, although deep SC neurons in the newborn have longer latencies and larger receptive fields than their adult counterparts, they are already highly active and are distributed in the typical adult admixture of visual, auditory, somatosensory, and multisensory neurons. Furthermore, the receptive fields of these neurons are already ordered into well organized topographic maps, and the different receptive fields of the same multisensory neurons show a good degree of cross-modal spatial register. These data, coupled with those from cat, suggest that the capacity to synthesize multisensory information does not simply appear in SC neurons at a prescribed maturational stage but rather develops only after substantial experience with cross-modal cues.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Sensory Systems

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Citations in the corpus

Early Experience & Multisensory Perceptual Narrowing (2014, background): “…only begin emerging after birth, that they do not integrate multisensory signals when they emerge, and that their ability to integrate auditory, visual, and tactile localization cues depends on the specific spatial alignment of these cues early in life (Wallace & Stein, 1997, 2000, 2001, 2007).”
Selective Attention and Multisensory Integration: Multiple Phases of Effects on the Evoked Brain Activity (2005, background): “For instance , single-cell recordings in animals have shown that there are polymodal representations of external space in the superior colliculus of cats (e.g., Wallace, Meredith, & Stein, 1998; Wallace & Stein, 1997) and monkeys (Wallace & Stein, 2001).”
Incorporating Cross-Modal Statistics in the Development and Maintenance of Multisensory Integration (2012, background): “However, this capability is not yet present at birth (Wallace and Stein, 1997, 2001).”
Early experience determines how the senses will interact. (2007, background): “However, despite its utility it does not appear to be an innate ability because the earliestappearing multisensory neurons in the superior colliculus (SC) are incapable of synthesizing cross-modal stimuli (Stein et al. 1973; Wallace and Stein 1997, 2001).”
Development of multisensory spatial integration and perception in humans. (2006, background): “This conclusion is consistent with anatomical findings in neonatal monkeys showing that the multisensory neurons that are already present and active in the superior colliculus at birth do not show the multisensory enhancement found in comparable sites in adults (Wallace & Stein, 2001).”