Go-no go differentiation to visual stimuli in cats with different early visual experiences.

In a previous paper (1) it was found that in cats deprived from birth of pattern vision with hoods, simultaneous object discrimination was dramatically impaired. In this paper go-no go differentiation is studied in such cats. The specific details of the methodology have been elaborated previously (1). The experiments were performed on 13 cats bred in the laboratory. The 8-th day after the birth the eyes of 6 kittens were hooded by double sheets of linen (H cats). The other animals served as controls (N* cats; the asterisk indicates that cats reared in the laboratory are not completely normal, see 1). After 4 or 5 weeks of permanently covered eyes with the hoods, the H cats were placed for a half an hour daily in a play-box with the hood removed. Inside either two sticks of unpainted wood (cats Hs) or two ping-pong balls (cats Hb) were present (Fig. 1). Such training in the unpainted boxes lasted for 2 months, after which animals continued to be hooded, and they were subjected to gc+ no go differentiation training.