Faculty Articles
Binocular deficits associated with early alternating monocular defocus. II. Neurophysiological observations
ISSN
0022-3077
Publication Date
11-1-2003
Abstract
Experiencing binocularly conflicting signals early in life dramatically alters the binocular responses of cortical neurons. Because visual cortex is highly plastic during a critical period of development, cortical deficits resulting from early abnormal visual experience often mirror the nature of interocular decorrelation of neural signals from the two eyes. In the preceding paper, we demonstrated that monkeys that experienced early alternating monocular defocus (-1.5, -3.0, or -6.0 D) show deficits in stereopsis that generally reflected the magnitude of imposed monocular defocus. Because these results indicated that alternating monocular defocus affected the higher spatial frequency components of visual scenes more severely, we employed microelectrode recording methods to investigate whether V1 neurons in these lens-reared monkeys exhibited spatial-frequency-dependent alterations in their binocular response properties. We found that a neuron's sensitivity to interocular spatial phase disparity was reduced in the treated monkeys and that this reduction was generally more severe for units tuned to higher spatial frequencies. In the majority of the affected units, the disparity-sensitivity loss was associated with interocular differences in monocular receptive field properties. The present results suggest that the behavioral deficits in stereopsis produced by abnormal visual experience reflect at least in part the constraints imposed by alterations at the earliest stages of binocular cortical processing and support the hypothesis that the local disparity processing mechanisms in primates are spatially tuned and can be independently compromised by early abnormal visual experience.
DOI
10.1152/jn.00975.2002
Volume
90
Issue
5
First Page
3012
Last Page
3023
Disciplines
Optometry
NSUWorks Citation
Zhang, Bin; Matsuura, Kazuki; Mori, Takafumi; Wensveen, Janice M.; Harwerth, Ronald S.; Smith, Earl L. III; and Chino, Yuzo M., "Binocular deficits associated with early alternating monocular defocus. II. Neurophysiological observations" (2003). Faculty Articles. 6.
https://nsuworks.nova.edu/hpd_opt_facarticles/6
