Effects of early binocular deprivation on visual input to cat superior colliculus

1. Recent work has demonstrated at least three distinct inputs to the superior colliculus in normal cats: a) the W-direct retinotectal pathway; b) the Y-direct retinotectal pathway; and c) the Y-indirect pathway which involves Y-cells in retina and lateral geniculate nucleus plus complex cells in cortex, the last being the corticotectal cells. 2. We investigated these inputs in five cats raised with binocular eyelid closure by studying the electrophysiological properties of 164 collicular neurons. After such binocular deprivation, the Y-indirect pathway was missing and the Y-direct pathway appeared reduced, although the W-direct input seemed unaffected. 3. Despite the loss of the Y-indirect input, collicular activation to electrical stimulation of cortex seemed normal in these cats. This suggested that the Y-indirect loop was affected between the optic tract and cortex, and this, in turn, correlated to the previously described reduction in recordable Y-cells from the lateral geniculate nucleus of binocularly deprived cats. 4. We found receptive-field correlates to this loss of Y-direct and Y-indirect input in the binocularly deprived cats. Compared to collicular neurons in normal cats, those in deprived cats exhibited abnormally strong dominance by the contralateral eye, loss of directional selectivity, and loss of responsiveness to fast visual stimuli. 5. These and other data lead to the suggestion that in normal and monocularly deprived cats, the corticotectal input dominates collicular receptive-field properties, whereas in binocularly deprived cats, the remaining retinotectal input dominates these properties.