EFFECTS OF VISUAL DEPRIVATION ON MORPHOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY OF CELLS IN THE CATS LATERAL GENICULATE BODY.

THEIMPORTANCEOFNORMALSENSORYSTIMULATION inthedevelopment and maintenance of the nervous system is now generally recognized. In the visual system this problem has usually been approached by examining the effects of sensory deprivation on structure and behavior (see reviews by Hebb (12) and Riesen (28)). An obvious way of extending this work would be to examine electrophysiologically the functional effects of visual deprivation, but such experiments require some knowledge of normal function. During the last 10 years single-cell responses have been examined and receptive-field arrangements compared at several levels in the cat’s visual pathway: in the retina (Zl), the lateral geniculate body (18), and the visual cortex (17, 19). This information provides the necessary background for a study of the immature and the stimulus-deprived visual system. The results of a physiological and anatomical study of the visual pathways in normal. and visually deprived kittens will be presented in a series of three papers. In the present paper we describe single-unit recordings in the optic tract and lateral geniculate body of kittens in which one eye had been deprived of vision, and an anatomical examination of the visual pathways in these animals. The second paper (20) will describe single-unit recordings in the striate cortex of newborn kittens. The final paper (32) will deal with responses of cells in the visual cortex of visually deprived animals.