Abstract
In the recent years the development of the visual system of mammals and its alterability by environmental influences has been addressed by hundreds of investigations. Detailed knowledge on the development and plasticity of the visual cortex, for example, has been accumulated for a variety of mammals, in particular cats and monkeys (rev. Fregnac and Imbert 1984). In contrast, very few studies were concerned with the development of higher stations of the visual system of other vertebrates. In birds, for example, the retinotectal projection of the chick tectofugal pathway is one of the best investigated paradigms for the development of the specificity of neuronal connections and axonal pathfinding (see Thanos, this volume); however, there were almost no developmental studies of other stations of the tectofugal pathway until recently. In one of the earliest studies Pettigrew and Konishi (1976a,b) showed that the visual wulst has physiological properties very similar to those of the visual cortex in mammals, and that monocular deprivation in these animals induces the same shift in ocular dominance of wulst neurons as it was observed in area 17 of the cat or the monkey.
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Bischof, H ., Herrmann, K., Engelage, J. (1991). Development and Plasticity of the Tectofugal Visual Pathway in the Zebra Finch. In: Bagnoli, P., Hodos, W. (eds) The Changing Visual System. NATO ASI Series, vol 222. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-3390-0_14
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