Sur M, Garraghty P E, Roe A W
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge 02139.
Science. 1988 Dec 9;242(4884):1437-41. doi: 10.1126/science.2462279.
Retinal cells have been induced to project into the medial geniculate nucleus, the principal auditory thalamic nucleus, in newborn ferrets by reduction of targets of retinal axons in one hemisphere and creation of alternative terminal space for these fibers in the auditory thalamus. Many cells in the medial geniculate nucleus are then visually driven, have large receptive fields, and receive input from retinal ganglion cells with small somata and slow conduction velocities. Visual cells with long conduction latencies and large contralateral receptive fields can also be recorded in primary auditory cortex. Some visual cells in auditory cortex are direction selective or have oriented receptive fields that resemble those of complex cells in primary visual cortex. Thus, functional visual projections can be routed into nonvisual structures in higher mammals, suggesting that the modality of a sensory thalamic nucleus or cortical area may be specified by its inputs during development.
通过减少新生雪貂一个半球视网膜轴突的靶点，并在听觉丘脑为这些纤维创造替代终末空间，已诱导视网膜细胞投射到内侧膝状体（主要的听觉丘脑核）。然后，内侧膝状体中的许多细胞由视觉驱动，具有大的感受野，并接收来自胞体小且传导速度慢的视网膜神经节细胞的输入。在初级听觉皮层也可记录到具有长传导潜伏期和大对侧感受野的视觉细胞。听觉皮层中的一些视觉细胞具有方向选择性或具有类似于初级视觉皮层中复杂细胞的定向感受野。因此，功能性视觉投射可以被引导到高等哺乳动物的非视觉结构中，这表明感觉丘脑核或皮层区域的模态可能在发育过程中由其输入所决定。
