Development of binocular vision in the kitten's striate cortex. Somewhat conflicting answers have been put forward, and in a major area, binocular vision, reports have ranged from severe immaturity to well-developed maturity. This is an important question to resolve since binocular cells in the visual cortex are thought to be the neural substrate for stereoscopic depth perception. Gratings with sinusoidal luminance distribution are presented to left, right, or both eyes. For each cell, we determine optimal values for orientation and spatial frequency.
Results are as follows.
In the normal adult, we have shown in previous work that most binocular interaction in the visual cortex can be accounted for on the basis of linear summation. Results from 3 and 4 week postnatal kittens are closely similar to those from adults. All types of binocular interaction found in adults are present in kittens. Furthermore, monocular and binocular tuning characteristics are comparable in kittens and adults. The clear changes that occur with age are optimal spatial frequencies and peak responses.