Boundary Cue Invariance in Cortical Orientation Maps
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We effortlessly perceive oriented boundaries defined by either luminance changes ('first-order' cues) or texture variations ('second-order' cues). Many neurons in mammalian visual cortex show orientation preference to both types of boundaries, but it is uncertain how they contribute to perceptual orientation cue-invariance at the neuronal population level. Using optical imaging in cat A 18, we observed highly similar orientation preference maps to first-order and a variety of second-order visual stimuli. Thus the neuronal representation of coarse-scale boundary orientation appears to be invariant to the characteristics (including local orientation) of the fine-scale textures by which those boundaries are defined. A common feature of second-order visual stimuli is that modulation shifts their Fourier energy for boundary orientation to the higher spatial frequencies of their constituent textures - our results suggest a common neural mechanism (demodulation) mediating visual processing of many kinds of texture boundary. The similarity between orientation maps to different stimuli implies that second-order responsive neurons are homogeneously distributed across the cortical surface. Such homogeneously cue-invariant orientation representation could provide a neural substrate for perceptual form-cue invariance, and reflect an optimal organization for encoding orientation information in natural scenes.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.001 |
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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".