Visual cognition in disorders of consciousness: From V1 to top‐down attention
Bibliographic record
Abstract
What is it like to be at the lower boundaries of consciousness? Disorders of consciousness such as coma, the vegetative state, and the minimally conscious state are among the most mysterious and least understood conditions of the human brain. Particularly complicated is the assessment of residual cognitive functioning and awareness for diagnostic, rehabilitative, legal, and ethical purposes. In this article, we present a novel functional magnetic resonance imaging exploration of visual cognition in a patient with a severe disorder of consciousness. This battery of tests, first developed in healthy volunteers, assesses increasingly complex transformations of visual information along a known caudal to rostral gradient from occipital to temporal cortex. In the first five levels, the battery assesses (passive) processing of light, color, motion, coherent shapes, and object categories (i.e., faces, houses). At the final level, the battery assesses the ability to voluntarily deploy visual attention in order to focus on one of two competing stimuli. In the patient, this approach revealed appropriate brain activations, undistinguishable from those seen in healthy and aware volunteers. In addition, the ability of the patient to focus one of two competing stimuli, and switch between them on command, also suggests that he retained the ability to access, to some degree, his own visual representations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".