Stein B E
Fed Proc. 1978 Jul;37(9):2240-5.
The present paper examines developmental and organizational parallels between visual and nonvisual cells in the cat superior colliculus (SC). An attempt is made to relate these developmental and organizational features to the role the SC plays in orientation behavior. In young kittens visually guided behavior is virtually nonexistent and requires many weeks to develop. Similarly, kitten SC cells are unresponsive to visual stimuli until at least 7 days after birth, and it is only after many weeks that SC cells behave as do those of the adult. In contrast to the development of visual cells, however, some neurons responsive to somatic stimuli are present in the SC on the day of birth, and cells responsive to acoustic stimuli appear several days later. Thus, the sequence in which modality represenstation appears in the cat SC parallels the developmental chronology of the use of different sensory cues for orientation. These data indicate that the functional roles of the visual, somatic, and acoustic representations may be similar. The finding that the organization of the somatic representation in the SC is similar to, and in register with, the visual representation is consistent with this possibility. It is suggested that the SC can utilize cues from a variety of modalities in order to facilitate appropriate orientation behavior.
本文研究了猫上丘（SC）中视觉细胞和非视觉细胞之间的发育及组织学平行关系。试图将这些发育和组织学特征与上丘在定向行为中所起的作用联系起来。在幼小猫中，视觉引导行为几乎不存在，需要数周时间才能发展起来。同样，小猫的上丘细胞在出生后至少7天内对视觉刺激无反应，只有在数周后，上丘细胞才表现得与成年动物的细胞一样。然而，与视觉细胞的发育不同，一些对躯体刺激有反应的神经元在出生当天就存在于上丘中，对听觉刺激有反应的细胞在几天后出现。因此，猫上丘中感觉模态表征出现的顺序与利用不同感觉线索进行定向的发育时间顺序相似。这些数据表明，视觉、躯体和听觉表征的功能作用可能相似。上丘中躯体表征的组织与视觉表征相似且对齐这一发现与此可能性相符。有人提出上丘可以利用来自多种感觉模态的线索来促进适当的定向行为。
