Rat and human visual-evoked potentials recorded under comparable conditions : a preliminary analysis to address the issue of predicting human neurotoxic effects from rat data

Abstract Pattern-onset visual-evoked potentials (VEPs) were recorded from rats and humans in order to perform cross-species comparison of neuronal functional properties reflected by the early VEP components. The spatial frequency of a sinusoidal test grating was varied in Experiment 1. For both species, amplitude of the first positive VEP component was larger at low spatial frequency and decreased as spatial frequency increased. The immediately succeeding negative component was small at low spatial frequency and was of maximal amplitude at moderate spatial frequency. The effects of stationary pattern adaptation on these components were investigated in Experiment 2. Subjects viewed either a blank field or the test grating prior to recording VEPs. For both species, adaptation had no effect on the positive component but strongly attenuated the negative component. Experiment 3, in which only humans were tested, indicated that the negative component was of cortical origin. Only cortical neurons are known to be orientation selective, and the effect of adaptation diminished as the orientation difference between the adaptation and test gratings increased. These results suggest that the early positive and negative components arise from parallel visual pathways, and that the rat components may reflect visual processes qualitatively similar to those of humans.