Dysregulation of excitatory neural firing replicates physiological and functional changes in aging visual cortex
Fig 7
Selectivity of cells with remapped receptive fields.
To disambiguate the relative impact that aging receptive field (RF) magnitude versus spatial structure has on orientation selectivity, we remap the magnitudes (input weight values) of each neuron’s RF to create two types of RFs: RFs with the original spatial structure they have in the young network but a magnitude distribution matching the aged distribution, and RFs with the aged spatial structure but young magnitude distribution. (See Methods for details). We create these hybrid RFs for each age and simulate the network model to measure the orientation selectivity of the neuron population. We find that restoring the young RF spatial structure improves selectivity in the late stages of aging, outperforming the baseline network (no remapping) as aging progresses, while the old RF spatial structure combined with young RF magnitudes maintains an overall higher level of selectivity over the entire age range.