LABORATORY
OF VISUAL PERCEPTION
|
Head: Prof. Andrzej
MICHALSKI, Ph.D., D.Sc. Staff: Kalina
BURNAT, Ph.D. Grażyna
NIEWIADOMSKA, Ph.D. Maciej
STASIAK, Ph.D., D.Sc. Irena
ŁAPIŃSKA Wojciech
BORKOWSKI Ph.D. students:
Marta BAKSALERSKA-PAZERA Ewa ROJEK Rafał
MILNER |
Laboratory of Visual Perception is the traditional name that
originates from the early days of the Nencki
Institute and is linked with the memories of its founders
prof. Żernicki and prof. Konorski. We keep this name
in spite of the fact that the profiles of research conducted in the laboratory
have branched out in time pretty far from the original domain. Nowadays, four
lines of research are pursued in the laboratory.
1. Human long latency, event-related
potentials. Most of
the experiments concern the visual system, although other modalities are used
incidentally. For many years, the research focused on the effects of pain and
stress on processing the non-emotional, every day stimuli. It showed that the
alterations of event-related responses to discrete, non-emotional stimuli could
be used as the indicators of pain, stress and possibly even such emotional
states as being successful or not.
The continuation of this line of studies is the presently conducted
research on the electrophysiological correlates of humor. The other presently
conducted line of experiments concerns the general mechanisms of the selection
of important information and the rejection of irrelevant inputs. Most of the
research is done on the visual system. The paradigm includes the use of P300
component of event-related
potential as an indicator of
important stimulus and the analysis of cortical responsiveness with the
‘probe’ stimuli. Results of these experiments indicate that
cortical responsiveness is reduced within the specific time window after the
advent of important stimulus. Perhaps the more intriguing outcome is that these
inhibitory effects seem to be different in cortical fields that represent the
different stages of information processing.
2. Effects of sensory deprivation in
the early period of life.
Binocular
deprivation from the visual input in cats. Experiments demonstrated that binocularly deprived
cats were impaired in the behavioral tests that required the perception of
global motion, such as moving random dot pattern. At the same time, the
deprivation did not produce any deficit in the detection of relative movement
of visual patterns such as squares. We concluded that the effects of
deprivation could be revealed better with the global motion stimulus whereas
the relative motion can be detected probably using positional cues. At present
we examine the effects of the deprivation on the detection of visual patterns
that should eliminate such cues.
Early
deprivation in gustatory system. His
experiments address a severe and long-lasting controversy regarding the
influence of early experience with a specific food on later food preference,
that is, the controversy between ‘the primacy effect’ and
‘the novelty effect’. His results show that the deprivation of a
variety of food tastes in early life influences later instrumental food
conditioning. The deprivation can reveal the potential or inborn palatability
of a specific food, potential food preference, and the potential food reward
value. The experiments, originally done on cats are now extended on omnivorous
animals.
3. Processes of aging. Using neurochemical
methods, we study the degeneration processes in the basal forebrain neurons of
the aging rats. We focus on the impairment of the uptake and retrograde
transport of the nerve growth factor (NGF). After injection of fluorescent
tracers into the neocortex and the hippocampus of
young and aged rats we analyze the numbers of retrogradely
labeled neurons in different subdivisions of the basal forebrain. In the same
experiment, we evaluate the expression level of proteins associated with
microtubule apparatus using immunostaining methods.
These experiments show that transport of NGF to basal forebrain is impaired in
aged animals. This is accompanied by changes in the level of expression and phosphorylation of microtubule binding Tau
proteins as well as their redistribution within the main neuronal compartments.
These could evidence of disorder in mechanisms of axonal transport. Our results
suggest that Tau-dependent breakdown in cytoskeleton
may cause a diminished transport of target-derived NGF leading to selective
vulnerability of cholinergic neurons in aged animals.
Selected Publications:
1. Burnat
K., Vandenbussche E., Żernicki
B. Global motion detection is impaired in cats deprived early of pattern
vision. Behavioral Brain Research 134: 59-65 (2002).
2. Niewiadomska,
G., Komorowski, S. and Baksalerska-Pazera,
M. Amelioration of cholinergic neurons dysfunction in aged rats by NGF depends
on the continuous supply of the trophic factor.
Neurobiology of Aging 23: 601-613 (2002).
3. Stasiak M. The
development of food preferences in cats: the new direction. Nutritional
Neuroscience 5: 221- 228 (2002).
4. Michalski
A. Interactions between P300 and passive probe responses differ in
different cortical areas. Acta Neurobiologiae
Experimentalis 61: 93-104 (2001).
5. Stasiak
M. The effect of early specific feeding on food conditioning
in cats. Developmental Psychobiology 39: 205-215 (2001).
6. Michalski
A. Effect of accomplishment and failure on P300 potentials evoked by neutral
stimuli. Neuropsychologia 37: 413-420
(1999).