title: Multisensory plasticity in adulthood: cross-modal experience enhances neuronal excitability and exposes silent inputs.
abstract: Multisensory superior colliculus neurons in cats were found to retain substantial plasticity to short-term, site-specific experience with cross-modal stimuli well into adulthood. Following cross-modal exposure trials, these neurons substantially increased their sensitivity to the cross-modal stimulus configuration as well as to its individual component stimuli. In many cases, the exposure experience also revealed a previously ineffective or "silent" input channel, rendering it overtly responsive. These experience-induced changes required relatively few exposure trials and could be retained for more than 1 h. However, their induction was generally restricted to experience with cross-modal stimuli. Only rarely were they induced by exposure to a modality-specific stimulus and were never induced by stimulating a previously ineffective input channel. This short-term plasticity likely provides substantial benefits to the organism in dealing with ongoing and sequential events that take place at a given location in space and may reflect the ability of multisensory superior colliculus neurons to rapidly alter their response properties to accommodate to changes in environmental challenges and event probabilities.
authors.affiliation: Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy, Wake Forest University School of Medicine, Winston-Salem, North Carolina 27157-1010, USA.
authors.forename: Liping
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Yu
authors.forename: Benjamin A
authors.initials: BA
authors.lastname: Rowland
authors.forename: Jinghong
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Xu
authors.forename: Barry E
authors.initials: BE
authors.lastname: Stein
mesh_terms: D000200:Action Potentials; D000818:Animals; D002415:Cats; D006309:Hearing; D009473:Neuronal Plasticity; D009474:Neurons / Q000502:physiology*; D012684:Sensory Thresholds; D013477:Superior Colliculi / Q000166:cytology / Q000502:physiology*; D014785:Vision, Ocular