Flexible cue anchoring strategies enable stable head direction coding in both sighted and blind animals
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Vision plays a crucial role in instructing the brain's spatial navigation systems. However, little is known about how vision loss affects the neuronal encoding of spatial information. Here, recording from head direction (HD) cells in the anterior dorsal nucleus of the thalamus in mice, we find stable and robust HD tuning in rd1 mice, a model of photoreceptor degeneration, that go blind by approximately one month of age. In contrast, placing sighted animals in darkness significantly impairs HD cell tuning. We find that blind mice use olfactory cues to maintain stable HD tuning and that prior visual experience leads to refined HD cell tuning in blind rd1 adult mice compared to congenitally blind animals. Finally, in the absence of both visual and olfactory cues, the HD attractor network remains intact but the preferred firing direction of HD cells drifts over time. These findings demonstrate flexibility in how the brain uses diverse sensory information to generate a stable directional representation of space.
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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 | 0.000 |
| 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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 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".