The severe amblyopia induced by chronic monocular deprivation is highly resistant to reversal in adulthood. Here we use a rodent model to show that recovery from deprivation amblyopia can be achieved in adults by a two-step sequence, involving enhancement of synaptic plasticity in the visual cortex by dark exposure followed immediately by visual…

Structures in the medial temporal lobe, including the hippocampus and perirhinal cortex, are known to be essential for the formation of long-term memory. Recent animal and human studies have investigated whether perirhinal cortex might also be important for visual perception. In our study, using a simultaneous oddity discrimination task, rats with…

Learning to navigate toward a goal is an essential skill. Place learning is thought to rely on the ability of animals to associate the location of a goal with surrounding environmental cues. Using the Morris water maze, a task popularly used to examine place learning, we demonstrate that distal cues provide animals with distance and directional…

The perirhinal and entorhinal cortices are critical components of the medial temporal lobe (MTL) declarative memory system. Study of their specific functions using blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), however, has suffered from severe magnetic susceptibility signal dropout resulting in poor…

It has been discovered recently that monocular deprivation in young adult mice induces ocular dominance plasticity (ODP). This contradicts the traditional belief that ODP is restricted to a juvenile critical period. However, questions remain. ODP of young adults has been observed only using methods that are indirectly related to vision, and the…

Prolonged visual deprivation from early childhood to maturity is believed to cause permanent visual impairment. However, there have been case reports of substantial improvement of binocular vision in human adults following lifelong visual impairment or deprivation. These observations, together with recent findings of adult ocular dominance…

Visual discrimination tasks are increasingly used to explore the neurobiology of vision in rodents, but it remains unclear how the animals solve these tasks: Do they process shapes holistically, or by using low-level features such as luminance and angle acuity? In the present study we found that when discriminating triangles from squares, rats did…

The Barnes maze is a spatial memory task that requires subjects to learn the position of a hole that can be used to escape the brightly lit, open surface of the maze. Two experiments assessed the relative importance of spatial (extra-maze) versus proximal visible cues in solving the maze. In Experiment 1, four groups of mice were trained either…

A unique behavioral paradigm has been developed for "Periplaneta americana" that assesses the timing and success of memory consolidation leading to long-term memory of visual-olfactory associations. The brains of trained and control animals, removed at the critical consolidation period, were screened by two-directional suppression subtractive…