the corpus callosum and the visual cortex plasticity is a game for two胼胝体和视觉皮层可塑性是一场游戏.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Neural Plasticity Volume 2012, Article ID 838672, 10 pages doi:10.1155/2012/838672 Review Article The Corpus Callosum and the Visual Cortex: Plasticity Is a Game for Two Marta Pietrasanta,1, 2 Laura Restani,2 and Matteo Caleo2 1 Laboratory of Neurobiology, Scuola Normale Superiore, Piazza dei Cavalieri 7, 56100 Pisa, Italy 2 CNR Neuroscience Institute, Via G. Moruzzi 1, 56124 Pisa, Italy Correspondence should be addressed to Matteo Caleo, caleo@r.it Received 16 December 2011; Accepted 19 April 2012 Academic Editor: Steve Lomber Copyright © 2012 Marta Pietrasanta et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Throughout life, experience shapes and selects the most appropriate brain functional connectivity to adapt to a changing environment. An ideal system to study experience-dependent plasticity is the visual cortex, because visual experience can be easily manipulated. In this paper, we focus on the role of interhemispheric, transcallosal projections in experience-dependent plasticity of the visual cortex. We review data showing that deprivation of sensory experience can modify the morphology of callosal fibres, thus altering the communication between the two hemispheres. More importantly, manipulation of callosal input activity during an early critical period alters developmental maturation of functional properties in visual cortex and modifies its ability to remodel in response to experience. We also discuss recent data in rat visual cortex, demonstrating that the corpus callosum plays a role in binocularity of cortical neurons and is invol