Emmanuel Osikpa^1,2, Kristina Nielsen^1,2; ¹Department of Neuroscience, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, ²Zanvyl Krieger Mind/Brain Institute, Johns Hopkins University

Visual experience has been shown to play a crucial role in the correct development of at least some visual functions. Direction selectivity in ferret primary visual cortex (V1), for example, requires visual experience (Li et al. 2006), as does direction selectivity in cat and ferret higher visual motion area PMLS (Spear et al, 1985; Khamiss 2025). However, not all functions are equally impacted by manipulations of visual experience: Orientation selectivity in ferret V1 does not require visual experience to develop normally, in contrast to the profound loss of direction selectivity (Li et al. 2006). Furthermore, deficits induced by altered visual experience differ between brain regions: Direction selectivity appears to be much more strongly affected by lack of visual experience in ferret PMLS than V1 (Khamiss 2025). Clearly, there is a complex interplay between visual experience and different functions at different stages in the visual hierarchy. Identifying which functions, in which areas, can develop based on intrinsic factors alone, and which require visual experience, will be important not just for improving our understanding of visual development, but also for building better models for developmental disorders. Here, we begin to address this issue by testing the impact of visual experience on a range of tuning functions in ferret V1 and PMLS. More precisely, we use extracellular recordings in V1 and PMLS to quantify tuning for stimulus parameters like orientation, direction, contrast, spatial and temporal frequency with and without visual experience. Our results confirm that V1 and PMLS orientation selectivity can develop largely normally without visual experience, while both areas show large deficits in direction selectivity. Other tuning functions are also impacted, including a significantly lower contrast sensitivity without visual experience. Again, these deficits appear larger in PMLS than V1, confirming the importance of systematically probing changes in tuning functions across visual areas.