THE DEVELOPMENT OF VISUAL CORTICAL PROPERTIES DEPENDS ON VISUO-PROPRIOCEPTIVE CONGRUENCE

The development of functional properties in visual cortex neurons is shown to depend on visual experience during a critical postnatal period. Extra-retinal factors, specifying the content of the visual experience in association with retinal inputs, are required in the developmental process of orientation selectivity. It is demonstrated that one of the necessary extra-retinal factors is the sensory afferent input from both eye and neck muscles during gaze movements. Several experiments are described and their results demonstrate the role of the sensitive afferents of gaze muscle (eye and neck muscles) in the processes of orientation selectivity development of visual cortical cells. It also suggested that both visual retinal inputs and inputs of eye muscle receptors ought to interact in a congruent manner during visual experience. It is assumed that proprioceptive inputs of eye muscles associated in a congruent manner with the retinal inputs may be the functional physiological correlate of the plasticity models, which suggest paired activities in the associative learning for strengthening synaptic transmission or of the more recent models, which propose the covariance hypothesis. © 1993, Academic Press Inc.