Experience with moving visual stimuli drives the early development of cortical direction selectivity

By Ye Li, Stephen D. Van Hooser, M. Mazurek, Leonard E. White, D. Fitzpatrick. 2008

195 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The onset of vision occurs when neural circuits in the visual cortex are immature, lacking both the full complement of connections and the response selectivity that defines functional maturity. Direction-selective responses are particularly vulnerable to the effects of early visual deprivation, but it remains unclear how stimulus-driven neural activity guides the emergence of cortical direction selectivity. Here we report observations from a motion training protocol that allowed us to monitor the impact of experience on the development of direction-selective responses in visually naive ferrets. Using intrinsic signal imaging techniques, we found that training with a single axis of motion induced the rapid emergence of direction columns that were confined to cortical regions preferentially activated by the training stimulus. Using two-photon calcium imaging techniques, we found that single neurons in visually naive animals exhibited weak directional biases and lacked the strong local coherence in the spatial organization of direction preference that was evident in mature animals. Training with a moving stimulus, but not with a flashed stimulus, strengthened the direction-selective responses of individual neurons and preferentially reversed the direction biases of neurons that deviated from their neighbours. Both effects contributed to an increase in local coherence. We conclude that early experience with moving visual stimuli drives the rapid emergence of direction-selective responses in the visual cortex.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Molecular Biology

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Citations in the corpus

Plasticity of Cortical Excitatory-Inhibitory Balance (2015, background): “…sensory stimulation can enhance synaptic transmission and receptive field organization, even without the postsynaptic cell firing action potentials (Dorrn et al. 2010, Froemke et al. 2007, Li et al. 2008), as long as cortical NMDA receptors are functional (Froemke et al. 2013, Gambino et al. 2014).”
Inhibitory synaptic plasticity: spike timing-dependence and putative network function (2013, background): “A different class of rules (Maffei et al., 2006; Li et al., 2008) fosters competition between neurons or synaptic inputs by increasing the inhibitory drive in response to weak (mostly subthreshold) excitation, while allowing a veto of iLTP for strong (suprathreshold) excitation.”
A triplet spike-timing–dependent plasticity model generalizes the Bienenstock–Cooper–Munro rule to higher-order spatiotemporal correlations (2011, background): “(30) observed the emergence of direction selectivity in cortical neurons of visually naive ferrets for the trained directions of motion.”
Spatial receptive field organization of multisensory neurons and its impact on multisensory interactions (2009, unknown): “…plausible explanation has come from studies in the visual system that have shown the spatial (and spatiotemporal) structure in receptive fields can be an efficient means of encoding spatial dynamics as would be seen with moving stimuli (Fiset and Dore, 1996; Victor et al., 1994; Li et al., 2008).”
Synaptic Plasticity Forms and Functions. (2020, background): “…the conditioned stimulus (CS) (e.g., tone, odor, location) overlaps with the unconditioned stimulus (US) (generally aversive stimuli) (McKernan & Shinnick-Gallagher 1997, Rogan et al. 1997, Yao & Dan 2001, Li et al. 2008, Butts & Kanold 2010, Ryan et al. 2015, Tonegawa et al. 2015, Kim & Cho 2017).”