Brown, T. C.; Barr, C.; Antin, M.; Nguyen, V.; McGee, A. W.; Samonds, J. M.

Sensory cortex is highly organized, but understanding why remains elusive. Here we demonstrate that depriving juvenile mice of vision in one eye during the critical period for the development of binocularity (monocular deprivation) caused enduring deficits in binocular depth perception. This deprivation of binocular vision severely degraded retinotopic mapping of binocular disparity tuning, despite no detectable differences in the range or selectivity of disparity tuning by populations of neurons. Disparity tuning was strongest in the central portion of the visual field and transitioned from representing nearer to farther depths from the lower to upper visual field, respectively. Monocular deprivation caused greater uniformity in disparity across visual space and an overall shift to nearer disparities. We propose that this disruption to the organization of disparity tuning explains impaired binocular depth perception.