Sleep and experience-dependent visual plasticity in the adult cerebral cortex: an update

Two recent papers provide the opportunity to discuss the latest advances in understanding three forms of experience-dependent visual plasticity that occur in the adult mouse cortex: flash-evoked visual plasticity, visual sequence plasticity, and stimulus-specific response potentiation. We summarize what is known about their distinct cellular mechanisms, and how they can be affected by sleep. In the case of stimulus-specific response potentiation, we suggest that enough progress has been made in the past 10 years to justify a revision of the previous notion that sleep promotes this form of plasticity by potentiating geniculo-cortical synapses. While pointing to the many open questions regarding these complex phenomena, we also suggest a few alternative explanations that could be tested in future experiments.