Visual Experience Is Necessary for the Development of Multisensory Integration
9580 • The Journal of Neuroscience, October 27, 2004 • 24(43):9580–9584 Brief Communication Visual Experience Is Necessary for the Development of Multisensory Integration Mark T. Wallace, Thomas J. Perrault Jr, W. David Hairston, and Barry E. Stein Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy, Wake Forest University School of Medicine, Winston-Salem, North Carolina 27157 Multisensoryneuronsandtheirabilitytointegratemultisensorycuesdevelopgraduallyinthemidbrain[i.e.,superiorcolliculus(SC)].To examine the possibility that early sensory experiences might play a critical role in these maturational processes, animals were raised in the absence of visual cues. As adults, the SC of these animals were found to contain many multisensory neurons, the large majority of which were visually responsive. Although these neurons responded robustly to each of their cross-modal inputs when presented indi- vidually, they were incapable of synthesizing this information. These observations suggest that visual experiences are critical for the SC to develop the ability to integrate multisensory information and lead to the prediction that, in the absence of such experience, animals will be compromised in their sensitivity to cross-modal events. Key words: cross-modal; dark rearing; multimodal; plasticity; subcortical; superior colliculus Introduction et al., 2000). What is not evident from these studies is whether Neurons in the superior colliculus (SC) have the remarkable ca- these experiences, so critical for the normal development of indi- pacity to integrate information from the different senses, a pro- vidual sensory systems, as well as for the normal cross-modal cess that substantially enhances the salience of the initiating event topography seen in multisensory structures (King et al., 1988; (Meredith and Stein 1983, 1985, 1986; King and Palmer, 1985; Knudsen and Brainard, 1991; Benedetti and Ferro, 1995), play Wallace et al., 1996, 1998; Frens and Van Opstal 1998; Bell et al., any role in the development of the ability of the brain to synthe- 2001; Perrault et al., 2003).
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