Abstract
Neurons in the ferret primary visual cortex (V1) exhibit direction selectivity when they respond to properly oriented black and white gratings moving in a preferred direction. Visual experience is required for the emergence of direction selectivity, but it can also be induced with 6 hours of early visual training (Li et al., 2006). Since V1 cells receive input from LGN cells, it is possible that LGN cells undergo some sort of change that allows V1 cells to be direction- selective. The purpose of current study is to examine the impact of short-term, early visual experience on the development of LGN receptive field properties, and how they might contribute to the rapid emergence of experience-dependent direction selectivity in V1. There are 3 hypotheses as to how this might work. LGN cells may become selective to direction themselves, such that they directly increase selectivity in V1. Or LGN cells may experience some other receptive field changes that permit direction selectivity in V1. Finally, the changes that permit direction selectivity may occur only in V1. Our experiments did not find evidence for direct increases in direction selectivity of LGN cells with experience, but our results indicated a shift in temporal frequency preference towards faster stimuli. We discuss how this may be indicative of faster processing speeds that permit the emergence of direction selectivity.