Speech perception relies on the accurate resolution of brief, successive sounds that change rapidly over time. Deficits in the perception of such sounds, indicated by a reduced ability to detect signals during auditory backward masking, strongly…
The relationship between behavioral and neural performance has been explored in adult animals, but rarely during the developmental period when perceptual abilities emerge. We used these naturally occurring changes in auditory perception to evaluate…
We have observed dramatic effects of tactile tongue stimulation on nystagmus eye movements in patients with acquired blindness, and we report these results. Six adult subjects (3 subjects with light perception or worse vision and 3 normal subjects)…
Von Economo neurons (VENs) are specialized projection neurons with a characteristic spindle-shaped soma and thick basal and apical dendrites. VENs have been described in restricted cortical regions, with their most frequent appearance in layers III…
Aging differentially alters forms of long-term potentiation in rat hippocampal area CAl. J. Neurophysiol. 79: 334-341, 1998. Long-term potentiation (LTP) of the Schaffer collateral/commissural inputs to CAI in the hippocampus was shown to consist of…
A major finding in the visual plasticity literature is that visual deprivation is effective only during an early 'sensitive' period, which is lengthened by dark rearing. Unresolved is whether the visual cortex is in a normally plastic state prior to…
Developmental alterations in N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA)-stimulated [H-3]norepinephrine release from rat brain cortical and hippocampal slices were studied. NMDA (10-1000 muM) resulted in a concentration-dependent increase in [H-3]norepinephrine…
An increasing number of studies show that listeners often have difficulty hearing in situations with background noise, despite normal tuning curves in quiet. One potential source of this difficulty could be sensorineural changes in the auditory…
