Fig. 8.

Effect of monaural occlusion on acoustic head orienting behavior in the ferrets with cortical lesions. Each plot shows in grayscale the conditional probability of different final head bearings, with a bin size of 7.5°. These data were obtained from the same trials used to show the approach-to-target responses in Fig. 7. The correlation between final bearing and target location observed before inserting the ear plug (top row) was completely disrupted in the extensive lesion group when the left ear was occluded, with the animals turning toward the right side irrespective of the target location (left middle panel). A smaller bias to the right was also observed in the animals with restricted cortical lesions (right middle panel). In neither group did the accuracy of the orienting responses improve during the period of earplugging. Removal of the earplug resulted in a complete return to normal head orienting behavior (Post Plug).