when one of a kitten's eyes was sewn shut the main changes in the visual system affected the
Monocular deprivation David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel (who won the Nobel prize in Physiology for their elucidation of receptive field properties of cells in primary visual cortex) first performed the technique in felines.[1] Cats (or kittens), although less-closely related evolutionarily to humans even than rodents, have a remarkably similar visual system to humans. They found that ocular dominance columns (the orderly clustering of V1 neurons representing visual input from one or both eyes) were dramatically disrupted when one eye was sewn shut for 2 months. In the normal feline, about 85% of cells are responsive to input to both eyes; in the monocularly-deprived animals, no cells receive input from both eyes.[2]
Odd-eyed cat The odd-eyed coloring is caused when either the epistatic (dominant) white gene (which masks any other color genes and turns a cat completely white)[4] or the white spotting gene (which is the gene responsible for bicolor and tuxedo cats)[5] prevents melanin (pigment) granules from reaching one eye during development,[3] resulting in a cat with one blue eye and one green, yellow, or brown eye. The condition only rarely occurs in cats that lack both the dominant white and the white spotting gene.[4]