Study probing visual memory and amblyopia unveils many-layered mystery
In decades of studying how neural circuits in the brain’s visual cortex adapt to experience, MIT Professor Mark Bear’s lab has followed the science wherever it has led. This approach has yielded the discovery of cellular mechanisms serving visual recognition memory, in which the brain learns what sights are familiar so it can focus on what’s new, as well as a potential therapy for amblyopia, a disorder where children born with disrupted vision in one eye can lose visual acuity there permanently without intervention. But this time, his lab’s latest investigation has yielded surprising new layers of mystery. Heading into the experiments described in a new paper in Cerebral Cortex, Bear and his team expected to confirm that key proteins called NMDA receptors act specifically in neurons in layer 4 of the visual cortex to make the circuit connection changes, or “plasticity,” necessary for both visual recognition memory and amblyopia. Instead,...