Human Visual Plasticity: Lessons from Children Treated for Congenital Cataracts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
At birth, infants can see only large objects of high contrast located in the central visual field. Over the next half year, basic visual sensitivity improves dramatically. The infant begins to perceive the direction of moving objects and stereoscopic depth, and to integrate the features of objects and faces. Nevertheless, it takes until about 7 years of age for acuity and contrast sensitivity to become as acute as those of adults and into adolescence for some aspects of motion and face processing to reach adult levels of expertise. An important developmental question is whether, and to what extent, the improvements in vision during normal development depend on normal visual experience. To find out, we have taken advantage of a natural experiment: children born with dense, central cataracts in both eyes that block all patterned visual input to the retina. The children are treated by surgically removing the cataractous lenses and fitting the eyes with compensatory contact lenses that allow the first focused patterned visual input to reach the retina. In the studies summarized in this chapter, the duration of deprivation – from birth until the fitting of contact lenses after surgery – ranged from just a few weeks to most of the first year of life. In other cases, the child began with apparently normal eyes but developed dense bilateral cataracts postnatally that blocked visual input. As in the congenital cases, the cataractous lenses were removed and the eyes fitted with contact lenses.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".