Many aspects of the later stages of neural development are guided by neuronal activity. Guidance is given both by intrinsic patterns of activity, before and after birth, and by activity resulting from experience after birth. Theoretical studies will address the role of activity-dependent mechanisms in the development of the mammalian primary visual cortex. Such cortical mechanisms appear to play an important role in many aspects of human health, including visual disorders such as strabismus and amblyopia, as well as recovery and reorganization of visual function after retinal lesions. The theoretical studies will address the following specific questions in the development of the primary visual cortex: (1) The relationships that may develop between the maps of retinotopy, ocular dominance, orientation, disparity, and other cortical receptive field properties such as preferred spatial frequency and spatial phase, and the relationships among these properties that develop in individual receptive fields, when inputs of four types (ON-center and OFF-center from the left and right eyes) compete to innervate a two-dimensional cortical layer representing layer 4 of primary visual cortex; (2) The relationships that develop between the receptive fields of excitatory and inhibitory neurons when both types of neurons are included, with realistic connectivity, in the model of the layer 4 circuit; (3) The effects on these relationships of simultaneous plasticity of intracortical, as well as, feedforward synapses, and of more realistic models of synaptic plasticity and competition motivated by recent experimental work. In all of these studies, the goal will be to characterize the different possible developmental outcomes that may result under activity-dependent, correlation-based mechanisms of synaptic plasticity, and to determine the experimentally measurable and manipulable factors that will determine the actual outcome, if such mechanisms underlie development. This will provide a basis for experimental tests of the hypothesis that such mechanisms underlie the studied phenomena, and ultimately for improvements of related human health problems, such as strabismus, amblyopia, and retinal lesions.

Agency
National Institute of Health (NIH)
Institute
National Eye Institute (NEI)
Type
Research Project (R01)
Project #
5R01EY011001-06
Application #
6179146
Study Section
Cognitive Functional Neuroscience Review Committee (CFN)
Program Officer
Oberdorfer, Michael
Project Start
1994-08-01
Project End
2003-07-31
Budget Start
2000-08-01
Budget End
2001-07-31
Support Year
6
Fiscal Year
2000
Total Cost
$179,752
Indirect Cost
Name
University of California San Francisco
Department
Physiology
Type
Schools of Medicine
DUNS #
073133571
City
San Francisco
State
CA
Country
United States
Zip Code
94143
Liu, Liu D; Miller, Kenneth D; Pack, Christopher C (2018) A Unifying Motif for Spatial and Directional Surround Suppression. J Neurosci 38:989-999
Zhang, Wujie; Falkner, Annegret L; Krishna, B Suresh et al. (2017) Coupling between One-Dimensional Networks Reconciles Conflicting Dynamics in LIP and Reveals Its Recurrent Circuitry. Neuron 93:221-234
Miller, Kenneth D (2016) Canonical computations of cerebral cortex. Curr Opin Neurobiol 37:75-84
Ahmadian, Yashar; Fumarola, Francesco; Miller, Kenneth D (2015) Properties of networks with partially structured and partially random connectivity. Phys Rev E Stat Nonlin Soft Matter Phys 91:012820
Ziskind, Avi J; Emondi, Al A; Kurgansky, Andrei V et al. (2015) Neurons in cat V1 show significant clustering by degree of tuning. J Neurophysiol 113:2555-81
Rubin, Daniel B; Van Hooser, Stephen D; Miller, Kenneth D (2015) The stabilized supralinear network: a unifying circuit motif underlying multi-input integration in sensory cortex. Neuron 85:402-17
Ramirez, Alejandro; Pnevmatikakis, Eftychios A; Merel, Josh et al. (2014) Spatiotemporal receptive fields of barrel cortex revealed by reverse correlation of synaptic input. Nat Neurosci 17:866-75
Toyoizumi, Taro; Kaneko, Megumi; Stryker, Michael P et al. (2014) Modeling the dynamic interaction of Hebbian and homeostatic plasticity. Neuron 84:497-510
Cimenser, Aylin; Miller, Kenneth D (2014) The effects of short-term synaptic depression at thalamocortical synapses on orientation tuning in cat V1. PLoS One 9:e106046
Toyoizumi, Taro; Miyamoto, Hiroyuki; Yazaki-Sugiyama, Yoko et al. (2013) A theory of the transition to critical period plasticity: inhibition selectively suppresses spontaneous activity. Neuron 80:51-63

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