PURPOSE: Damage of primary visual cortex in adult @entity1 , monkeys and @entity468 severely disrupts vision by disconnecting much of the cogni-tive processing machinery of extrastriate cortex from its source of visual signals in the retina. Equivalent lesions sustained early in life result in partial sparing of visual processing functions and evidence from the mature brain suggests that systematic training procedures can ameliorate the impact of remaining deficits. The purpose of the present work was to use two reflex-based, @entity227 and orienting tasks to test for the therapeutic effects of reha-bilitative training in @entity468 that sustained lesions of primary cortical areas 17 _ 18 in adulthood, and to test whether similar training is of benefit to @entity468 that incurred @entity75 at one month-of-age (P28) or shortly after birth (P1). METHODS: @entity468 were trained to attend to static @entity227 and tested on their ability to disengage the cynosure and orient towards a target presented in the periphery of the testing arena. Targets were: 1) a high contrast, dark, moved rod; 2) an illuminated static light-emitting diode (LED); and 3) a broad band, white noise, sound stimulus. RESULTS: On Task 1, @entity468 with lesions of areas 17 _ 18 sustained in adulthood are markedly impaired whereas @entity468 that sustained lesions in infancy exhibit partial sparing of the visual operations underlying this task. With training, the performance of all @entity468 improved. On Task 2, performance by the adult-lesion and the P1-groups were markedly impaired, whereas the P28-group exhibited partial sparing. On Task 3, per-formance by all groups was uniformly high. No detectable benefits of training were identified on tasks 2 and 3. CONCLUSIONS: Overall, the results show that @entity468 incur definite benefits of training following visual cortex lesions regardless of whether the lesions were sustained early in life or later, but the benefits are limited to specific types of visual stimuli.

Training ameliorates deficits in XXXX and orienting following lesions of primary visual cortex sustained in adulthood and in infancy.

@entity1 :: ('9606', 'Species') :: ['humans'] @entity468 :: ('9685', 'Species') :: ['cats', 'Cats'] @entity75 :: ('MESH:D001927', 'Disease') :: ['equivalent lesions'] @entity227 :: ('MESH:D014786', 'Disease') :: ['visual and auditory cynosures', 'visual detection']
@entity227 :: (MESH:D014786,Disease) :: ['visual detection']
