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. 2017 Jul 6;7:4772. doi: 10.1038/s41598-017-05118-1

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© The Author(s) 2017

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Exemplar neurons illustrating the results of cross-modal testing in various conditions. (A) The normal profile of multisensory enhancement in superior colliculus (SC) neurons. Left: a neuron’s visual (dark gray) and auditory (light gray) receptive fields (RFs), and the positions of the visual and auditory stimuli, are shown on the schematic. Conventions are the same as in Fig. 2. Middle: rasters (trials ordered bottom-to-top), show responses to visual (V), auditory (A) and spatiotemporally concordant visual-auditory (VA) stimuli. Electronic traces of the stimuli are shown above the rasters. Right: A summary graph of the mean response magnitudes and the multisensory enhancement index (ME) show that the multisensory response significantly exceeded the strongest unisensory comparator response (V) in this normal exemplar. (B) With omnidirectional noise-rearing, however, RF register was less precise, and the VA response was no greater than the V response in this baseline condition. (C) After 6 months of subsequent experience in a normal housing environment (NE-6), the typical multisensory SC neuron showed little change from baseline. RF overlap was still less precise than normal and no capacity for multisensory enhancement was evident. Its response to the cross-modal stimulus was no greater than to one of the component stimuli. (D1) This profile was little changed after an additional 6 months of housing in the normal environment (NE-12). (D2) In contrast, after weekly visual-auditory cross-modal exposure sessions conducted during the same period, the typical neuron exhibited good RF register as well as multisensory enhancement capabilities (VA Trained). Sum = the addition of the two unisensory responses. Error bars indicate SEM. **P ≤ 0.001.