Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Center for Visual Science, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York, USA.
J Neurophysiol. 2011 Oct;106(4):1923-32. doi: 10.1152/jn.00095.2011. Epub 2011 Jul 13.
Visual cortical neurons are selective for the orientation of lines, and the full development of this selectivity requires natural visual experience after eye opening. Here we examined whether this selectivity develops without seeing lines and contours. Juvenile ferrets were reared in a dark room and visually trained by being shown a movie of flickering, sparse spots. We found that despite the lack of contour visual experience, the cortical neurons of these ferrets developed strong orientation selectivity and exhibited simple-cell receptive fields. This finding suggests that overt contour visual experience is unnecessary for the maturation of orientation selectivity and is inconsistent with the computational models that crucially require the visual inputs of lines and contours for the development of orientation selectivity. We propose that a correlation-based model supplemented with a constraint on synaptic strength dynamics is able to account for our experimental result.
视觉皮层神经元对线条的方向具有选择性,而这种选择性的完全发展需要在睁眼后进行自然视觉体验。在这里,我们研究了在不观察线条和轮廓的情况下,这种选择性是否会发展。幼年雪貂在暗室中饲养,并通过观看闪烁稀疏点的电影进行视觉训练。我们发现,尽管缺乏轮廓视觉体验,这些雪貂的皮层神经元仍然发展出强烈的方向选择性,并表现出简单细胞的感受野。这一发现表明,明显的轮廓视觉体验对于方向选择性的成熟并不是必需的,这与那些关键地需要线条和轮廓的视觉输入才能发展出方向选择性的计算模型不一致。我们提出,基于相关性的模型辅以对突触强度动态的约束,可以解释我们的实验结果。