Rats were trained on a four-way shuttle box with a compound light-tone conditioned stimulus (CS) until they emitted 7 avoidance responses in 10 trials (7/10) prior to bilateral ablation of the visual cortex or sham surgery. On Day 5 after surgery, rats were cued with either the compound light-tone CS, the light or tone portion of the CS only, or had no exposure to the CS. On Day 10 after surgery, all animals were tested for avoidance retention under the same conditions as preoperative training. The findings indicate that following a lesion, cueing with the light-tone compound CS facilitates performance as does light alone. Cueing to the tone alone has no effect. In sham animals, only cueing with the light-tone CS was effective in enhancing avoidance retention. Results are interpreted as early and modality-specific sensory cueing may facilitate the recovery process.

No description available.

Blindsight is a phenomenon in which patients suffering damage to the primary visual cortex (V1) perceive themselves as blind, but nonetheless seem to have some residual capacity to distinguish between visual stimuli better than chance. Blindsight can be divided into two subtypes: blindsight type I and blindsight type II. Blindsight type I is defined as visual capacity in the absence of acknowledged awareness. Patients with blindsight type II have visual capacity with some feeling or sensation in the blind field. Visual pathways bypassing V1 are assumed to be responsible for the residual capacity in blindsight. To investigate whether these pathways are present in healthy individuals we examined if it is possible to induce blindsight in healthy individuals by reviewing studies that have tried to induce blindsight with transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). We found that TMS might be able to induce blindsight type I of side detection. We also found that TMS might be able to induce blindsight type II of colour, orientation, and trustworthiness. Further, we found that both conscious and unconscious perception of shapes are dependent on processing in early visual cortex (EVC) in healthy individuals. We conclude that the full capacity seen in blindsight is most probable caused by neural reorganisation post trauma. The visual pathways bypassing V1 are, if present in healthy individuals, too weak to influence behaviour with the possible exception of side detection. Additionally, we conclude that the use of a binary awareness scale in blindsight studies fails to capture vaguely seen stimuli.

Neuroscience research has been largely focused on neurons, while an equally important cell type, glia, was sidelined until recently. Astrocytes are star-shaped glial cells responsible for a variety of homeostatic processes of the central nervous system in addition to participating in synaptogenesis and neuronal signal transmission. A variety of immunohistochemical markers have been utilized to visualize these cells in the brain including glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP), vimentin, and aldehyde dehydrogenase 1 family member L1 (ALDH1L1). The current study makes use of a multiplex immunohistochemistry protocol developed in collaboration with General Electric to stain rhesus monkey brain tissue samples from the lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC; n=5) and the primary visual cortex (V1; n=4) with a large number of markers, including GFAP, vimentin, and ALDH1L1 as well as neuronal, microglial, and oxidative stress markers. Using algorithms and manual cell classification, we were able to obtain neuronal and astrocytic counts and use these to estimate astrocyte-to-neuron ratios (ANRs) of the individual brain areas and laminae as well as assess the relative intensity of the markers of interest between areas. Among our findings there was higher ANRs in LPFC compared to V1 gray matter as well as in layer 1 compared to layer 2 in both areas studied. There is also a higher density of astrocytes in layer 1 potentially due to the recognized lack of neurons in this layer. We found significantly higher intensities of GFAP across all gray matter layers in V1 compared to LPFC as well as higher intensities for TSPO and Cleaved Caspase-3 in some V1 layers compared to their LPFC counterparts. This higher intensity of V1 reactive astrocyte markers are potentially due to the increased number of neurons these astrocytes need to support as demonstrated by the low ANR seen in V1 when compared to LPFC. In order to further our knowledge of normal astrocyte properties in these brain areas, it is imperative that we confirm our counts with stereologic studies and include oligodendrocyte markers in our multiplex staining protocol in order to better assess glial numbers within our sections. Additionally, morphological studies assessing rhesus monkey astrocytes identified with a variety of markers is important as we have shown that no one marker stains all astrocytes even though most astrocytes express more than one marker at a time.

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No / Until recently, it was widely believed that object position and object motion were represented independently in the visual cortex. However, several studies have shown that adaptation to motion produces substantial shifts in the perceived position of subsequently viewed stationary objects [[13]]. Two stages of motion adaptation have been proposed: an initial stage at the level of V1 and a secondary stage thought to be located in V5/MT [[4]]. Indeed, selective adaptation can be demonstrated at each of these levels of motion analysis [[5, 6]]. What remains unknown is which of these cortical sites are involved in modulating the positional representation of subsequently viewed objects. To answer this question directly, we disrupted cortical activity by using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) immediately after motion adaptation. When TMS was delivered to V5/MT after motion adaptation, the perceived offset of the test stimulus was greatly reduced. In marked contrast, TMS of V1 had no effect on the changes that normally occur in perceived position after motion adaptation. This result demonstrates that the anatomical locus at which motion and positional information interact is area V5/MT rather than V1/V2.

In situ hybridization was used to examine effects of monocular enucleation on nicotinic acetylcholine receptor subunit cc3 mRNA in the rat dLGNand visual cortex. After 28 days postoperative, there were no significant differences in α3 mRNA density between the contralateral (deprived) and ipsilateral (non-deprived) sides. The lack of obvious effects of visual deprivation on α3 mRNA density suggests that other factors, possibly intrinsic to dLGNand visual cortex, govern the postnatal expression of α3 mRNA.

Neuronal connections in cat visual cortex are highly susceptible to visual experience at early postnatal age and thus serve as a useful model of neural plasticity. The biochemical mechanisms underlying this cortical plasticity remain unclear. In this thesis, the development of several elements in calcium-related signal transduction systems, including the type-1 muscarinic and alpha-1 adrenoceptor systems as examples of cell surface receptors and protein kinase C. calcium/calmodulin dependent kinase II and inositol 1,4,5 phosphotate receptors as second messenger targets, were investigated using the methods of immunocytochemistry and autoradiography. The results show that each receptor develops with its own time-table and laminar distribution; the various elements all culminate and display the maximal colocalization during the critical period; and, only at this age, the cortical levels of the receptors and kinases are dependent on subcortical afferents. The results suggest that cell surface receptors and their second messenger targets develop in specific temporal and spatial patterns, which may be both genetically and environmentally determined, and this specific sequence of development of the molecules for signal transduction results in a series of modifications in the morphology and physiology of the developing cortex leading to its maturation. / Medicine, Faculty of / Graduate

Motion in the outside world forms one of the primary uses of visual information for many animals. The ability to interpret motion quickly and accurately permits interaction with and response to events in the outside world. While much is known about some aspects of motion perception, there is less agreement about how feature selectivity leading to motion perception is actually formed in the convergent and divergent pathways of the visual system. It is even less clear how these classical understandings of motion processing, often driven by artificial stimuli with little resemblance to the outside world, correspond to responses of neurons when using more natural stimuli. In this thesis, we probe these gaps, first by demonstrating that synchronization within the visual thalamus leads to efficient representations of motion (through tuning properties) in primary visual cortex, exploiting precise timing across populations in a unique manner compared to traditional models. We then create a novel “minimally-natural” stimulus with the appearance of an infinite hallway wallpapered with sinusoidal gratings, to probe how such minimally natural features modulate our predictions of neural responses based upon feature tuning properties. Through encoding and decoding models we find that measuring a restricted tuning parameter space limits our ability to capture all response properties but preserves relevant information for decoding. We finish with an exploration of ethologically relevant natural features, perspective and complex motion, and show that even moderate amounts of each feature within or near the classical V1 receptive field changes the neural response from what classical feature tuning would predict and improves stimulus classification tremendously. Together all of these results indicate that capturing information about motion in the outside world through visual stimuli requires a more advanced model of feature selectivity that incorporates parameters based on more complex spatial relationships.