Sleep and experience-dependent visual plasticity in the adult cerebral cortex: an update

Two recent papers provide the opportunity to discuss the latest advances in understanding three forms of experience-dependent visual plasticity that occur in the adult mouse cortex: flash-evoked visual plasticity, visual sequence plasticity, and stimulus-specific response potentiation (SRP). We summarize what is known about their distinct cellular mechanisms, and how they can be affected by sleep. In the case of SRP, we suggest that enough progress has been made in the past 10 years to justify a revision of the previous notion that sleep promotes this form of plasticity by potentiating geniculo-cortical synapses. While pointing to the many open questions regarding these complex phenomena, we also suggest a few alternative explanations that could be tested in future experiments.