Post-crucial period effects of visual experience and deprivation on the guinea-pig superior collicular map of auditory space.

There were two primary aims of this study. First, to observe if the map of auditory space in the superior colliculus (SC) of the guinea-pig could recover after periods of normal visual experience following visual deprivation during the crucial period. Second, to determine whether any degradation of the space map was observed when the animal was visually deprived for different lengths of time after the crucial period. Animals deprived of visual experience during the crucial period and then allowed normal experience did show a limited ability to construct a SC auditory space map. Whereas visual deprivation following normal auditory and visual experience during the crucial period caused a profound degradation, of both spatial tuning and topography, of auditory receptive fields in the SC. Additional data indicate that the SC auditory space map remains vulnerable to visual deprivation until at least 100 days after birth.