Granule cells in the olfactory bulb (OB) are continually produced and added into the neuronal circuit in the adult brain. Sensory input to the OB plays a key role in the survival of newly generated granule cells. Here, we examined in the adult mice whether there is a time window after the generation of new granule cells when their survival is strongly influenced by sensory input. New granule ce...

While the demonstration of crossmodal plasticity is well established in congenital and early blind individuals, great debate still surrounds whether those who acquire blindness later in life can also benefit from such compensatory changes. No proper consensus has been reached despite the fact that a proper understanding of the developmental time course of these changes, and whether their occurr...

Changes in structure and function of the auditory system can be produced by experimentally manipulating the sensory environment, and especially dramatic effects result from deprivation procedures. An alternative deprivation strategy utilizes naturally occurring lesions. The congenitally deaf white cat represents an animal model of sensory deprivation because it mimics a form of human deafness c...

In classical sensory cortical map plasticity, the representation of deprived or underused inputs contracts within cortical sensory maps, whereas spared inputs expand. Expansion of spared inputs occurs preferentially into nearby cortical columns representing temporally correlated spared inputs, suggesting that expansion involves correlation-based learning rules at cross-columnar synapses. It is ...

In the mammalian visual system, sensory experience is widely thought to sculpt cortical circuits during a precise critical period. In contrast, subcortical regions, such as the thalamus, were thought to develop at earlier ages in a vision-independent manner. Recent studies at the retinogeniculate synapse, however, have demonstrated an influence of vision on the formation of synaptic circuits in...

Each cerebral hemisphere processes sensory input from both sides of the body, but the impact of this convergence on shaping and modifying receptive field properties remains controversial. Here we investigated the effect of chronic deprivation of ipsilateral sensory whiskers on receptive field plasticity in primary somatosensory cortex. In the absence of ipsilateral whiskers, cortical receptive ...