Long-Term Visual Training Increases Visual Acuity and Long-Term Monocular Deprivation Promotes Ocular Dominance Plasticity in Adult Standard Cage-Raised Mice.

ABSTRACT: For routine behavioral tasks, mice predominantly rely on olfactory cues and tactile information. In contrast, their visual capabilities appear rather restricted, raising the question whether they can improve if vision gets more behaviorally relevant. We therefore performed long-term training using the visual water task (VWT): adult standard cage (SC)-raised mice were trained to swim toward a rewarded grating stimulus so that using visual information avoided excessive swimming toward nonrewarded stimuli. Indeed, and in contrast to old mice raised in a generally enriched environment (Greifzu et al., 2016), long-term VWT training increased visual acuity (VA) on average by more than 30% to 0.82 cycles per degree (cyc/deg). In an individual animal, VA even increased to 1.49 cyc/deg, i.e., beyon

SUBMITTER: Hosang L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5780841 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Jan-Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature