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- Title
Manipulating critical period closure across different sectors of the primary auditory cortex.
- Authors
De Villers-Sidani, Etienne; Simpson, Kimberly L; Lu, Y.-F.; Lin, Rick C. S.; Merzenich, Michael M.
- Abstract
During early brain development and through 'adult' experience-dependent plasticity, neural circuits are shaped to represent the external world with high fidelity. When raised in a quiet environment, the rat primary auditory cortex (A1) has a well-defined 'critical period', lasting several days, for its representation of sound frequency. The addition of environmental noise extends the critical period duration as a variable function of noise level. It remains unclear whether critical period closure should be regarded as a unified, externally gated event that applies for all of A1 or if it is controlled by progressive, local, activity-driven changes in this cortical area. We found that rearing rats in the presence of a spectrally limited noise band resulted in the closure of the critical period for A1 sectors representing the noise-free spectral bands, whereas the critical period appeared to remain open in noise-exposed sectors, where the cortex was still functionally and physically immature.
- Subjects
AUDITORY cortex; TEMPORAL lobe; NEURAL circuitry; NEURAL development; NEUROPLASTICITY
- Publication
Nature Neuroscience, 2008, Vol 11, Issue 8, p957
- ISSN
1097-6256
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1038/nn.2144