Limit of spared pattern vision following lesions of the immature visual cortex

Lesions of primary visual cortex sustained early in life spare certain aspects of visual processing that can be linked to expansions of bypass pathways to extrastriate cortex. They also trigger, in an age-dependent way, partial or complete transneuronal retrograde degeneration of beta (X) retinal ganglion cells, which are implicated in visual processing under conditions of low contrast. We used two-dimensional geometric patterns whose saliency was reduced by gradually increasing levels of superimposed masking lines, and by reductions in spatial contrast. Normative data were collected from intact cats, and baseline lesion data were collected from cats with lesions sustained as young adults (postnatal day 180, P180). Experimental data were collected from cats that sustained lesions on P1-3 or P26-30. For high contrast patterns, the adult group was impaired at both acquisition (sequential progressive levels of masking) and concurrent (parallel high and low levels of masking) performance, whereas the early-lesioned groups were impaired only at concurrent performance. All lesion groups were equally impaired when contrast was reduced to modest or lower levels. These results show that sparing of masked-pattern learning is limited to the high end of the spatial contrast domain.