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- Title
Contribution of the Pulvinar and Lateral Geniculate Nucleus to the Control of Visually Guided Saccades in Blindsight Monkeys.
- Authors
Norihiro Takakuwa; Kaoru Isa; Hirotaka Onoe; Jun Takahashi; Tadashi Isa
- Abstract
After damage to the primary visual cortex (V1), conscious vision is impaired. However, some patients can respond to visual stimuli presented in their lesion-affected visual field using residual visual pathways bypassing V1. This phenomenon is called "blindsight." Many studies have tried to identify the brain regions responsible for blindsight, and the pulvinar and/or lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) are suggested to play key roles as the thalamic relay of visual signals. However, there are critical problems regarding these preceding studies in that subjects with different sized lesions and periods of time after lesioning were investigated; furthermore, the ability of blindsight was assessed with different measures. In this study, we used double dissociation to clarify the roles of the pulvinar and LGN by pharmacological inactivation of each region and investigated the effects in a simple task with visually guided saccades (VGSs) using monkeys with a unilateral V1 lesion, by which nearly all of the contralesional visual field was affected. Inactivating either the ipsilesional pulvinar or LGN impaired VGS toward a visual stimulus in the affected field. In contrast, inactivation of the contralesional pulvinar had no clear effect, but inactivation of the contralesional LGN impaired VGS to the intact visual field. These results suggest that the pulvinar and LGN play key roles in performing the simple VGS task after V1 lesioning, and that the visuomotor functions of blindsight monkeys were supported by plastic changes in the visual pathway involving the pulvinar, which emerged after V1 lesioning.
- Subjects
LATERAL geniculate body; VISUAL pathways; VISUAL perception; MONKEYS; VISUAL fields
- Publication
Journal of Neuroscience, 2021, Vol 41, Issue 8, p1755
- ISSN
0270-6474
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2293-20.2020