Slater A, Morison V, Somers M
Department of Psychology, Washington Singer Laboratories, University of Exeter, UK.
Perception. 1988;17(5):597-602. doi: 10.1068/p170597.
There is some controversy concerning whether or not the visual abilities of the newborn are mediated entirely through subcortical pathways or whether the visual cortex is functioning at birth. A critical test of cortical functioning is discrimination of orientation: orientation-selective neurons are found in the visual cortex but not in subcortical parts of the visual system. An experiment is described in which newborn infants were habituated to a square-wave grating oriented 45 degrees from vertical. After habituation, significant preferences for the novel, mirror-image, grating were found, a result which argues for some degree of visual cortical functioning at birth.
关于新生儿的视觉能力是完全通过皮层下通路介导，还是视觉皮层在出生时就发挥作用，存在一些争议。对皮层功能的一个关键测试是方向辨别：在视觉皮层中发现了方向选择性神经元，而在视觉系统的皮层下部分则没有。本文描述了一项实验，其中新生儿习惯了与垂直方向成45度角的方波光栅。习惯化后，发现新生儿对新的镜像光栅有明显的偏好，这一结果表明出生时视觉皮层有一定程度的功能。
