Measurement of a natural visual orienting behavior in mice enhances the utility of mouse models of neurodevelopmental disorders
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Authors
Allen, Kelsey
Issue Date
2025
Type
Dissertation
Language
en_US
Keywords
Alternative Title
Abstract
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder that affects social, cognitive, and motor behaviors while also altering fundamental sensory processing. Historically, a diagnosis of autism occurs when difficulties in complex social interactions, such as language acquisition and other cognitive functions, become overwhelmingly apparent. However, there is increasing recognition that more fundamental aspects of non-verbal communication related to visual motor processing in infants precede these complex social communication deficits. For example, significant differences in eye movement, visuospatial attention, eye-contact, and an increased incidence of amblyopia, where visual information from one of the eyes is perceptually suppressed, has been linked with later emergence of more severe behavioral deficits in families with inherited forms of autism. All of these visual processes are subject to experience-dependent plasticity at early stages of brain development and may therefore be sensitive to the effects of the underlying cause(s) of autism. A wealth of evidence supports the idea that modifications in brain wiring during development, and how that wiring is altered by experience, underlies the emergence of ASD. Further, differences in brain plasticity during development are thought to also explain why the disorder manifests as a spectrum of symptoms across sensory, motor, social, and cognitive domains. Though mice are widely used to study and model the progression of “disease” processes in known genetic causes of ASDs, few behavioral assays exist in mice to quantify early visuomotor responses likely conserved between rodents and primates that are also affected in ASDs. This has thus prevented targeted investigation of possible neural circuit developmental mechanisms in the visual system that may be affected early in the progression of ASDs. My dissertation describes several connected studies that 1) establish a novel visual behavioral paradigm to study neural mechanisms underlying visual orienting plasticity throughout development in the mouse and 2) validates its relevance to the study of mouse models of neurodevelopmental disorders.