The effects of monocular visual deprivation: disuse or binocular interaction?

Patches of transnueronal degeneration were produced in the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) by retinal laser burns and a tarsorrhaphy was performed in the contralateral eye of Macaca mulatta during infancy. The adverse effect of unilateral visual deprivation on geniculate cell growth was absent in those portions of deprived LGN laminae that were located opposite a degenerated patch. This finding supports the hypothesis that arrest of geniculate cell growth from unilateral visual deprivation is caused by abnormal binocular interaction. However, the concurrent findings of arrest of cell growth in the monocularly innervated LGN changes, since abnormal binocular interaction cannot take place in those parts of the LGN that receive input exclusively from one eye.