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Monocular deprivation is an experimental technique used by neuroscientists to study central nervous system plasticity. Generally, one of an animal's eyes is sutured shut during a period of high cortical plasticity (4–5 weeks-old in mice (Gordon 1997)). This manipulation serves as an animal model for amblyopia, a permanent deficit in visual sensation not due to abnormalities in the eye (which occurs, for example, in children who grow up with cataracts - even after cataract removal, they do not see as well as others).