Role of emergent neural activity in visual map development
By James B. Ackman, Michael C. Crair. 2013
180 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The initial structural and functional development of visual circuits in reptiles, birds, and mammals happens independent of sensory experience. After eye opening, visual experience further refines and elaborates circuits that are critical for normal visual function. Innate genetic programs that code for gradients of molecules provide gross positional information for developing nerve cells, yet much of the cytoarchitectural complexity and synaptogenesis of neurons depends on calcium influx, neurotransmitter release, and neural activity before the onset of vision. In fact, specific spatiotemporal patterns of neural activity, or ‘retinal waves’, emerge amidst the development of the earliest connections made between excitable cells in the developing eye. These patterns of spontaneous activity, which have been observed in all amniote retinae examined to date, may be an evolved adaptation for species with long gestational periods before the onset of functional vision, imparting an informational robustness and redundancy to guide development of visual maps across the nervous system. Recent experiments indicate that retinal waves play a crucial role in the development of interconnections between different parts of the visual system, suggesting that these spontaneous patterns serve as a template-matching mechanism to prepare higher-order visually-associative circuits for the onset of visuomotor learning and behavior. Key questions for future studies include determining the exact sources and nature of spontaneous activity during development, characterizing the interactions between neural activity and transcriptional gene regulation, and understanding the extent of circuit connectivity governed by retinal waves within and between sensory-motor systems.
Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Molecular Biology
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Citations in the corpus
- Resting-State Retinotopic Organization in the Absence of Retinal Input and Visual Experience (2015, background): “…deprivation disrupts ocular dominance column formation, receptive field size, and orientation, spatial frequency, direction, and disparity tuning (for review, see Hirsch and Leventhal, 1978; Movshon and Van Sluyters, 1981; Sherman and Spear, 1982; Rao and Jacobson, 2006; Ackman and Crair, 2014).”
- Functional connectivity of visual cortex in the blind follows retinotopic organization principles (2015, methodology): “Our findings show that these are sufficient to drive and maintain the organization of macro-scale cortical maps (McLaughlin et al., 2003; Cang et al., 2005; Huberman et al., 2008; Cang and Feldheim, 2013; Ackman and Crair, 2014) even in the absence of later patterned vision or light perception.”