Aging Affects Fine and Coarse Coding of Orientation Information in Macaque Primary Visual Cortex

Abstract

Human visual function degrades with age. Previous studies of visual perception have shown that aged people have worse performance in the coding of orientation information. However, the neuronal mechanism still remains elusive. In this study, we performed in vivo extracellular single-unit recording in the primary visual cortex of senescent and young monkeys, and we used the Chernoff distance to quantify the encoded information of neurons for fine and coarse orientation difference. Our results showed that the Chernoff distance for fine orientation difference in senescent monkeys is significantly smaller than that in young monkeys. In contrast, the Chernoff distance for the coarse coding was comparable in young and old groups. Meanwhile, increased spontaneous response and maximum evoked response was also observed. Further investigation of neuronal correlation showed higher noise and signal correlations in aging monkeys than that in young monkeys. These correlation changes predicted a detrimental effect on the efficiency of population coding of orientation information. Taken together, our results suggest that the information coding efficiency of orientation information is impaired during aging and might account for the degradation of performance in human fine orientation discrimination task.

Keywords: aging; fine and coarse coding; macaque; orientation discrimination; the primary visual cortex (V1 area); visual degradation.