P1-28: Supranormal Orientation Selectivity of Visual Neurons in Orientation-Restricted Animals

Altered sensory experience in early life often leads to remarkable adaptations in humans and animals. Consistent with this, previous studies have reported that restricting visual inputs in young animals can make drastic long-lasting changes in the early sensory areas of their brains. Typically, the majority of sensory neurons are allocated to stimulus features to which the animals were exposed. However, if that is the only change, it will make the sensory encoding highly redundant with many neurons signaling the same features. Are there additional changes, heretofore unnoticed, to functional properties of single neurons in such adaptation processes? Here we show that stimulus selectivities like the sharpness of tuning of single neurons in the primary visual cortex are modified to match a particular environment that has a restricted range of orientations. Specifically, we found in orientation-restricted animals that neurons tuned to an experienced orientation show sharper orientation tuning than neurons in...