Psychiatry<\/a>, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN) King’s College London<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
This\u00a0research adds to a growing body of evidence that\u00a0shows\u00a0the retina pre-processes the visual scene before passing this on to the rest of the brain\u00a0for\u00a0further\u00a0processing.\u00a0It\u00a0is the first study to show that this pre-processing is dependent on the visual environment\u00a0in which\u00a0the retina\u00a0and the fish\u00a0are\u00a0developing.\u00a0<\/p>\n
To understand whether the environment could influence how the eye develops, researchers placed\u00a0fish\u00a0in striped environments\u00a0which were either horizontal or vertical\u00a0in the first 5 days of their lives. Stripes are highly salient visual features which all animals use to\u00a0help understand\u00a0what they are looking at.\u202f<\/p>\n
“People actually use horizontal and vertical\u00a0features\u00a0to make sense of more complex images like faces,\u00a0where the nose is a strong vertical line and the brow is a clear horizontal line,” explains Professor Hindges.\u202f<\/p>\n
Half the fish grew up in a world full of horizontal stripes. The other half experienced a world with only vertical lines.\u00a0Using a microscope to image neurons in the\u00a0retina,\u00a0the\u00a0researchers discovered\u00a0that\u00a0the two\u00a0groups\u00a0of fish had differently shaped neurons in their retinas.\u202fThe neural activity that is sent from the eye to the rest of the\u00a0brain\u00a0in\u00a0the retina was also\u00a0biased\u00a0towards the stripes the fish had seen in these first few days since birth.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“This has a striking potential to suggest that the places we grow up influence\u00a0how we see the world,” comments Professor Hindges.\u202f”This is in keeping with studies in humans that have shown that people who grow up in\u00a0different visual\u00a0environments\u00a0perceive\u00a0optical illusions differently. What\u00a0wasn’t\u00a0known was that\u00a0these changes are being at least partially driven by\u00a0changes in\u00a0the earliest stage of visual processing:\u00a0in the retina.”\u00a0<\/p>\n
The scientists\u00a0tested whether these\u00a0changes in the retina affected how the fish behaved after 5 days.\u00a0This behavioral test leveraged the zebrafishes’\u00a0innate\u00a0preference to turn towards stripes parallel to their body, which\u00a0relies on the ability to\u00a0discern\u00a0between different orientations of stripes.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Using a virtual reality system,\u00a0that\u00a0tracks\u00a0movements\u00a0as they occur,\u00a0the fish\u00a0were given\u00a0a choice between turning towards stripes parallel or perpendicular to them.\u00a0The\u00a0zebrafish\u00a0that grew up in the horizontal world\u00a0failed to\u00a0display this innate preference for parallel\u00a0stripes,\u00a0behaving\u00a0as if they\u00a0had more\u00a0difficulty\u202fdifferentiating\u00a0between horizontal and vertical stripes.\u202fWhereas the fish\u00a0that grew up in the vertically striped world retained this preference.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0“We wanted to\u00a0explore\u00a0how these changes that are happening in the eye can impact\u00a0the actual behavior of the\u00a0fish,” explains Dr Phoebe Reynolds, first author on the study, who carried out the research as part of her PhD at King’s.\u00a0“To do this, we developed a novel behavioral test in virtual reality where the fish can display a preference for lines of certain orientations. This let us test whether their\u00a0innate\u00a0preferences\u00a0were affected by the environment they were raised in.”\u00a0<\/p>\n
“The design of the tracking setup and the behavioral paradigms were inspired by our observations of the structural and functional changes in the retina. Whether these features would also\u00a0impact\u00a0the ability to distinguish stripe patterns during behaviour was completely unclear. We were therefore very surprised that the conditions in which the animals were raised indeed had a major impact on performance,” says Professor Armin Bahl from the\u00a0“Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour” of the\u00a0University of Konstanz, who led the behavioural experiments in this study.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Using a genetic manipulation,\u00a0researchers\u00a0were able to isolate the contribution of retinal\u00a0plasticity to this behavior. Without the influence of plasticity in the retina, the fish\u00a0from both environments\u00a0behaved the same,\u00a0demonstrating\u00a0that\u00a0the changes in the biology of the eye that\u00a0are\u00a0driving how they behave.\u202f<\/p>\n
The research was\u00a0primarily\u00a0funded by\u00a0the Medical Research Council (MRC),\u00a0the Leverhulme Trust, The Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, and the Emmy Noether Program.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Dr Phoebe Reynolds is now a postdoctoral researcher at the\u00a0Friedrich Miescher Institute of Biomedical Research in Basel, Switzerland.<\/p>\n
Source:<\/p>\n
Journal reference:<\/p>\n
Reynolds, P., et al. (2026). Early visual experience elicits cellular and functional plasticity in the retina and alters behavior. Neuron.\u00a0DOI:\u00a010.1016\/j.neuron.2026.05.001.\u00a0https:\/\/www.cell.com\/neuron\/fulltext\/S0896-6273(26)00372-7<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The environment experienced by young zebrafish\u00a0influences both the shape and electrical activity of the neurons in the eye,\u00a0which\u00a0impacts\u00a0subsequent\u00a0behavior.\u00a0…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":120397,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[84,13221,5939,61,60,21704,12054,3261,89,82,210],"class_list":["post-516389","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-brain","tag-eye","tag-fish","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-microscopy","tag-neuron","tag-neurons","tag-research","tag-science","tag-virtual-reality"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/516389","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=516389"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/516389\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/120397"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=516389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=516389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=516389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}