Premium accounts now available! Sign up and create a premium account. Read more Close

Advertisement

Image

Robust learning-driven structural and functional plasticity of spines in the mature mouse cortex

Preprint Created on 09 Jun 2026 bioRxiv

Spines in the adult cortex are thought to be highly stable, and that their capacity for modest remodeling supports learning. Using a visual association task and a multilevel imaging approach in adult mice, we found a robust learning-driven increase in the complexity of spine nanostructure, as well as a rapid and persistent increase in spine formation during task acquisition that were accompanied by an overall reduction in spine size of layer 2/3 neurons in the primary visual cortex (V1). Trained animals further had an increased fraction of spines tuned to the task-relevant orientations, and the discriminability of spine responses in naive mice was predictive of their subsequent performance. Our results demonstrate that learning drives an increase in spine preferences for task-relevant information and point to reconfiguration of spine nanostructure and spine inputs as the structural drivers of these changes.

Fariborzi, M., Eaves, D. G., Demir, L. Y., Wu, Y., Skeens, A., Hruska, M., Ribic, A.

Advertisement

Stats

  • Recommendations n/a n/a positive of 0 vote(s)
  • Views 6
  • Comments 0

Recommended by

  • No recommendations yet.

Post a comment

You need to be signed in to post comments. You can sign in here.

Comments

There are no comments yet.

Advertisement