Declined contrast sensitivity of neurons along the visual pathway in aging cats
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Changes in the visual cortex appear to mediate much of the visual degradation during normal aging. However, how aging affects different stages along the visual pathway is unclear. In the current study, the contrast response function, one of the most important properties of neurons from early visual areas to high brain areas, was systematically compared along the visual pathway, including the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN), early visual cortices (A17 and A18), and posteromedial lateral suprasylvian cortex (PMLS, analog to the medial temporal area (MT) in monkeys) of young and old cats. We found that the effects of aging on the LGN were negligible, whereas those in the striate cortex were substantial, with even more severe degradation in the PMLS. Reduced contrast sensitivity of neurons in the three cortical areas was accompanied by enhanced maximal visual response, increased spontaneous activity, and decreased signal-to-noise ratio, while LGN neurons exhibited largely normal response properties. Our results suggested that there was a progressively greater effect of aging on neurons at successively higher stages in the visual pathway.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".