What does a neuron learn from multisensory experience?
The brain's ability to integrate information from different senses is acquired only after extensive sensory experience. However, whether early life experience instantiates a general integrative capacity in multisensory neurons or one limited to the particular cross-modal stimulus combinations to which one has been exposed is not known. By selectively restricting either visual-nonvisual or auditory-nonauditory experience during the first few months of life, the present study found that trisensory neurons in cat superior colliculus (as well as their bisensory counterparts) became adapted to the cross-modal stimulus combinations specific to each rearing environment. Thus, even at maturity, trisensory neurons did not integrate all cross-modal stimulus combinations to which they were capable of responding, but only those that had been linked via experience to constitute a coherent spatiotemporal event. This selective maturational process determines which environmental events will become the most effective targets for superior colliculus-mediated shifts of attention and orientation.
School of Life Science, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China; and.
Jinghong
J
Xu
School of Life Science, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China; and.
Liping
L
Yu
Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy, Wake Forest School of Medicine, Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
Terrence R
TR
Stanford
Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy, Wake Forest School of Medicine, Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
Benjamin A
BA
Rowland
Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy, Wake Forest School of Medicine, Winston-Salem, North Carolina bestein@wakehealth.edu.
Barry E
BE
Stein
D000818:Animals; D001288:Attention; D001307:Auditory Perception; D002415:Cats; D005260:Female; D007858:Learning; D008297:Male; D009474:Neurons / Q000502:physiology*; D009949:Orientation; D013477:Superior Colliculi / Q000166:cytology / Q000254:growth & development / Q000502:physiology*; D014796:Visual Perception
auditory; cat; somatosensory; superior colliculus; visual