Experience-dependent plasticity is the adaptability of brain circuits as a result of changes in neural activity, a phenomenon that has been proposed as the neural basis for important brain function in health and disease. The underlying mechanisms of experience-dependent plasticity can take different forms, depending on the organisms and brain areas under investigation. A better understanding of...

Experience-dependent plasticity in the cortex is often higher during short critical periods in postnatal development. The mechanisms limiting adult cortical plasticity are still unclear. Maturation of intracortical GABAergic inhibition is suggested to be crucial for the closure of the critical period for ocular dominance (OD) plasticity in the visual cortex. We find that reduction of GABAergic ...

Synapses are the fundamental units of neuronal circuits. Synaptic plasticity can occur through changes in synaptic strength, as well as through the addition/removal of synapses. Two-photon microscopy in combination with fluorescence labeling offers a powerful tool to peek into the living brain and follow structural reorganization at individual synapses. Time-lapse imaging depicts a dynamic pict...

Kole K. Experience-dependent plasticity of neurovascularization. J Neurophysiol 114: 2077–2079, 2015. First published December 31, 2014; doi:10.1152/jn.00972.2014.—Experience powerfully shapes structural and functional organization of neurons during development and in adulthood. Recent experiments in the mouse primary somatosensory cortex now suggest that experience is also a critical factor in...

Experience-dependent plasticity is a prominent feature of the mammalian visual cortex. Although such neural changes are most evident during development, adult cortical circuits can be modified by a variety of manipulations, such as perceptual learning and visual deprivation. Elucidating the underlying mechanisms at the cellular and synaptic levels is an essential step in understanding neural pl...

Studies in nonhuman primates have provided evidence of rapid neural reorganization in somatosensory cortex after brain damage [1] and amputation [2]. Furthermore, there is also evidence of experience-dependent plasticity in both human [3-5] and nonhuman primates [6] that is induced by repetitive tactile stimulation. Given the evidence of plasticity subsequent to both neural damage and tactile e...

Y.E. Cohen et al. (eds.), Neural Correlates of Auditory Cognition, Springer Handbook of Auditory Research 45, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4614-2350-8_10, © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013

Stroke outcome is highly variable. Experiments in this thesis test the hypothesis that experience prior to a stroke is an important variable in the manifestation of stroke. Optokinetic tracking was used to evaluate the effects of visual cortex stroke and MCA occlusion in rats. Normal laboratory rats showed a small, but significant decrease in tracking thresholds following visual cortex stroke. ...

Theories of temporal coding by cortical neurons are supported by observations that individual neurons can respond to sensory stimulation with millisecond precision and that activity in large populations is often highly correlated. Synchronization is highest between neurons with overlapping receptive fields and modulated by both sensory stimulation and behavioral state. It is not yet clear wheth...

The organism's ability to adapt to the changing sensory environment is due in part to the ability of the nervous system to change with experience. Input and synapse specific Hebbian plasticity, such as long-term potentiation (LTP) and long-term depression (LTD), are critical for sculpting the nervous system to wire its circuit in tune with the environment and for storing memories. However, thes...