Abstract
Earlier studies have shown in toads that lesions to certain pretectal nuclei lead to hyperactive prey-catching in response to any moving visual object. These and other investigations suggest that in toads the discrimination of moving visual objects for prey recognition depends on inhibitory connections from pretectum to optic tectum, with both structures obtaining retinal inputs. The question thus arose how pretectum is controlled. In the present study, we examined intracellular responses of pretectal cells to electrical pulses applied to the ipsilateral ventral striatum, vSTR, or to the lateral forebrain bundle, LFB, in which striatal axons project to pretectal nuclei. The main results can be summarized in four points: (i) Pretectal neurons receive inhibitory and/or excitatory postsynaptic inputs evoked by electrical stimulation of LFB or by visual stimuli. The relatively greater percentage of purely inhibitory inputs and the occurrence of latencies between 2 and 3 ms are conspicuous. (ii) Pretectal neurons receive LFB-mediated information also via polysynaptic connections, probably involving an entopeduncular relay. (iii) Electrical stimulation of the vSTR elicits postsynaptic inhibitory or sequential excitatory/inhibitory potentials in pretectal cells; the fastest input (2 ms) was inhibitory. (iv) The fact that striatal stimulation leads to inhibitory inputs in pretectal neurons is consistent with the concept of a “disinhibitory” striato-pretectotectal function suitable to prime or arouse the tectal prey-catching releasing system. This is also consistent with studies showing visual “prey neglect” after ablation of vSTR.
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Ewert, JP., Matsumoto, N., Schwippert, W.W., Beneke, T.W. (1991). Striato-Pretecto-Tectal Connections: A Substrate for Arousing the Toad’s Response to Prey. In: Arbib, M.A., Ewert, JP. (eds) Visual Structures and Integrated Functions. Research Notes in Neural Computing, vol 3. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-84545-1_19
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-84545-1_19
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