Embryonic light stimulation induces different asymmetries in visuoperceptual and visuomotor pathways of pigeons

In birds, visual object discrimination performance is lateralized with a dominance of the right eye/left hemisphere. This asymmetry is induced by embryonic light stimulation. However, visually guided behavior, even during simple object distinction tasks, is composed of different behavioral and neural modules. Therefore, the aim of the present study was to test whether all neural subsystems involved in visual discriminations are lateralized in a similar way after prehatch visual stimulation. To examine this question, two behavioral paradigms were used which reveal complementary aspects of visually guided behavior. The first was the grain-grit discrimination task in which no left-right differences in the number of pecks, but significant differences in the number of grains can be found. Therefore, grain-grit discrimination reveals visuoperceptual performance but not visuomotor speed. The contrary seems to be the case for a successive pattern discrimination with a VR32 schedule. Here, the hemispheres do not differ with respect to discrimination accuracy but with regard to the number of pecks emitted. Thus, successive pattern discrimination with lean VR schedules reveals hemispheric differences in visuomotor speed without testing visuoperceptual performance. Using these two paradigms a group of light and a group of dark incubated pigeons were tested. The results show that dark incubated birds evinced no asymmetry in any measure while light incubated ones were right-eye dominant in both variables. However, light incubation induced a visual left hemispheric dominance by modulating two different processes, a left-hemispheric increase of visuoperceptual processes; and a right-hemispheric decrease for visuomotor speed. Taken together these data show that embryonic light stimulation elicits visual lateralization by differently modulating visuoperceptual and visuomotor systems in both hemispheres.