Developmental plasticity of texture discrimination following early vision loss in the marsupial Monodelphis domestica

摘要: ABSTRACT Behavioral strategies that depend on sensory information are not immutable; rather they can be shaped by the specific context in which animals develop. This behavioral plasticity depends remarkable capacity for brain to reorganize response alterations environment, particularly when changes input occur at an early age. To study this phenomenon, we utilize short-tailed opossum, a marsupial has been valuable animal model developmental due extremely immature state of its nervous system birth. Previous studies opossums have demonstrated removal retinal inputs development results profound cortical connectivity and functional organization visual somatosensory cortex; however, consequences well understood. We trained blind (EB) sighted control (SC) perform two-alternative forced choice texture discrimination task. Whisker trimming caused acute deficit accuracy both EB SC indicating primarily used whisker-based strategy guide choices based tactile cues – though performance recovered days, suggesting shift use other body parts whiskers were absent. Mystacial important groups; genal only contributed animals. significantly outperformed accuracy, being more sensitive textural differences ~75 μm smaller. Our support compensation following blindness using inputs, especially whisker system.