Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy, Wake Forest School of Medicine, Medical Center Blvd., Winston Salem, NC 27157, United States.
Cereb Cortex. 2023 Feb 7;33(4):948-958. doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhac113.
Concordant visual-auditory stimuli enhance the responses of individual superior colliculus (SC) neurons. This neuronal capacity for "multisensory integration" is not innate: it is acquired only after substantial cross-modal (e.g. auditory-visual) experience. Masking transient auditory cues by raising animals in omnidirectional sound ("noise-rearing") precludes their ability to obtain this experience and the ability of the SC to construct a normal multisensory (auditory-visual) transform. SC responses to combinations of concordant visual-auditory stimuli are depressed, rather than enhanced. The present experiments examined the behavioral consequence of this rearing condition in a simple detection/localization task. In the first experiment, the auditory component of the concordant cross-modal pair was novel, and only the visual stimulus was a target. In the second experiment, both component stimuli were targets. Noise-reared animals failed to show multisensory performance benefits in either experiment. These results reveal a close parallel between behavior and single neuron physiology in the multisensory deficits that are induced when noise disrupts early visual-auditory experience.
一致的视听刺激增强了单个上丘 (SC) 神经元的反应。这种“多感觉整合”的神经元能力不是天生的：只有在大量的跨感觉（例如听觉-视觉）经验之后才能获得。通过在全向声音中饲养动物（“噪声饲养”）来掩盖短暂的听觉线索，会妨碍它们获得这种经验的能力，以及 SC 构建正常的多感觉（听觉-视觉）转换的能力。SC 对一致的视听刺激组合的反应受到抑制，而不是增强。本实验在一个简单的检测/定位任务中研究了这种饲养条件的行为后果。在第一个实验中，一致的跨模态对的听觉成分是新的，只有视觉刺激是目标。在第二个实验中，两个组成刺激都是目标。在这两个实验中，噪声饲养的动物都没有表现出多感觉性能优势。这些结果揭示了在噪声干扰早期视听经验时引起的多感觉缺陷中，行为和单个神经元生理学之间的密切平行关系。
