Environmental enrichment rescues precocious critical period
Environmental enrichment rescues precocious critical period
Critical periods are developmental time windows when neural circuits in the brain are shaped by experience. A new study from Jianhua Cang and Xiaorong Liu's labs reveals that a precocious critical period actually prevents the proper matching of binocular information in the mouse visual cortex. Importantly, growing up in an environment with enriched sensory, motor and social experiences, rescues the cortical deficits by advancing the matching process to coincide with precocious critical period, likely through epigenetic mechanisms. This study is published in the journal, Neuron (Article and Video Abstract), and authored by Bor-Shuen Wang, Liang Feng, Mingna Liu, Xiaorong Liu and Jianhua Cang.
In the following image, artist and preschool teacher David Winter depicts the enriched environment in a cartoon, relating to his own experience of taking children to playground.
10 September 2013