Department of Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm Brain Institute Stockholm, Sweden.
Brain Behav. 2013 Jan;3(1):24-34. doi: 10.1002/brb3.102. Epub 2012 Nov 29.
Stimulation of sensory pathways is important for the normal development of cortical sensory areas, and impairments in the normal development can have long-lasting effect on animal's behavior. In particular, disturbances that occur early in development can cause permanent changes in brain structure and function. The behavioral effect of early sensory deprivation was studied in the mouse whisker system using a protocol to induce a 1-week sensory deprivation immediately after birth. Only two rows of whiskers were spared (C and D rows), and the rest were deprived, to create a situation where an unbalanced sensory input, rather than a complete loss of input, causes a reorganization of the sensory map. Sensory deprivation increased the barrel size ratio of the spared CD rows compared with the deprived AB rows; thus, the map reorganization is likely due, at least in part, to a rewiring of thalamocortical projections. The behavioral effect of such a map reorganization was investigated in the gap-crossing task, where the animals used a whisker that was spared during the sensory deprivation. Animals that had been sensory deprived performed equally well with the control animals in the gap-crossing task, but were more active in exploring the gap area and consequently made more approaches to the gap - approaches that on average were of shorter duration. A restricted sensory deprivation of only some whiskers, although it does not seem to affect the overall performance of the animals, does have an effect on their behavioral strategy on executing the gap-crossing task.
刺激感觉通路对于皮质感觉区的正常发育很重要，而正常发育过程中的损伤会对动物的行为产生持久的影响。特别是在发育早期发生的干扰会导致大脑结构和功能的永久性变化。通过在出生后立即进行为期 1 周的感觉剥夺的方案，研究了早期感觉剥夺对小鼠胡须系统的行为影响。仅保留了两排胡须（C 和 D 排），而其余的则被剥夺，从而造成不平衡的感觉输入，而不是完全丧失输入，导致感觉图的重新组织。感觉剥夺导致与被剥夺的 AB 排相比，保留的 CD 排的桶状比增加；因此，这种图重组可能至少部分是由于丘脑皮质投射的重新布线所致。在缺口穿越任务中研究了这种图重组的行为影响，在该任务中，动物使用在感觉剥夺期间保留的胡须。在缺口穿越任务中，感觉剥夺后的动物与对照动物表现一样好，但在探索缺口区域时更加活跃，因此更多地接近缺口 - 平均而言，接近缺口的持续时间较短。尽管仅对一些胡须进行有限的感觉剥夺似乎不会影响动物的整体表现，但对它们执行缺口穿越任务的行为策略有影响。
