Abstract
The guinea pig is born with the adult colouring, with functioning sense organs, with surprisingly good motor coordination and vivacious behavior setting in only minutes after birth. The brain is about 35% smaller than in the adult, but its internal structure looks the same down to the level of the network of fibres and synapses. And yet, the guinea pig learns as readily as related species do (Jonson et al, 1975; Petersen et al, 1977) and we expect therefore structural changes to take place in its brain after birth perhaps to the end of the animal’s life. Such changes accompanying learning, neatly separated from the effects of development by the event of birth, should be more readily detectable in the guinea pig than in other species.
Keywords
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1998 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Braitenberg, V., Schüz, A. (1998). Postnatal Changes, Possibly Due to Learning, in the Guinea Pig Cortex. In: Cortex: Statistics and Geometry of Neuronal Connectivity. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-03733-1_25
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-03733-1_25
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-662-03735-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-662-03733-1
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive