Higher brain functions served by the lowly rodent primary visual cortex
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527.full.pdf
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668.76 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
d4464250908b1cb7b57a147f7830df1a
Author(s)
Gavornik, Jeffrey
Bear, Mark
Date Issued
September 2014
Journal
Learning & Memory
Publisher
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Citation
Gavornik, Jeffrey P. and Bear, Mark F. “Higher Brain Functions Served by the Lowly Rodent Primary Visual Cortex.” Learning & Memory 21, 10 (September 2014): 527–533 © 2014 Gavornik and Bear
Version
Final published version
Abstract
It has been more than 50 years since the first description of ocular dominance plasticity-the profound modification of primary visual cortex (V1) following temporary monocular deprivation. This discovery immediately attracted the intense interest of neurobiologists focused on the general question of how experience and deprivation modify the brain as a potential substrate for learning and memory. The pace of discovery has quickened considerably in recent years as mice have become the preferred species to study visual cortical plasticity, and new studies have overturned the dogma that primary sensory cortex is immutable after a developmental critical period. Recent work has shown that, in addition to ocular dominance plasticity, adult visual cortex exhibits several forms of response modification previously considered the exclusive province of higher cortical areas. These "higher brain functions" include neural reports of stimulus familiarity, reward-timing prediction, and spatiotemporal sequence learning. Primary visual cortex can no longer be viewed as a simple visual feature detector with static properties determined during early development. Rodent V1 is a rich and dynamic cortical area in which functions normally associated only with "higher" brain regions can be studied at the mechanistic level.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Picower Institute for Learning and Memory
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1101/LM.034355.114
