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Published December 23, 1976 | public
Journal Article

Effect of monocular deprivation on binocular neurones in the owl's visual Wulst

Abstract

Despite the two hundred million years during which their evolutionary history was different from mammals, birds possess a central visual apparatus with surprising functional similarities to the striate cortex of cats and monkeys. The visual Wulst of the owl contains neurones which can be binocularly activated and which show precise selectivity for the orientation, direction of movement and binocular disparity of moving straight line contours, all characteristic properties of single neurones recorded from the striate cortex of cats and monkeys. We were interested to determine whether binocular neurones in the owl's Wulst are also sensitive to visual experience in the neonatal period since another important characteristic of binocular neural connections in cat and monkey visuail cortex is their extreme sensitivity to monocular deprivation during the critical period. The preliminary observations we present here, on young, monocularly-deprived owls, suggest that the functional parallel between the mammalian striate cortex and the avian Wulst extends to the phenomenon of plasticity as well.

Additional Information

© 1976 Nature Publishing Group. Received August 9; accepted November 8, 1976. This work was supported by the Spencer Foundation and a grant from the US National Institutes of Health. Herb Adams, Gene Akutagawa, Gary Blasdel, and Larry Crowder provided excellent technical assistance.

Additional details

Created:
August 19, 2023
Modified:
October 25, 2023