Arc Visualization of Odor Objects Reveals Experience-Dependent Ensemble Sharpening, Separation, and Merging in Anterior Piriform Cortex in Adult Rat
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Visualization using the immediate early gene Arc revealed sparser and more robust odor representations in the anterior piriform cortex of adult rats when odor was associated with water reward over 2-3 d. Rewarded odor "mixtures" resulted in rats responding to either component odor similarly, and, correspondingly, the odor representations became more similar as indexed by increased overlap in piriform Arc-expressing (Arc(+)) pyramidal neurons. The increased overlap was consistent with the rats' generalization from component odors. Discriminating among highly similar odor mixtures for reward led to increased differentiation of the neural representations as indexed by a reduction in overlap for piriform Arc(+) pyramidal neurons after training. Similar odor mixture discrimination also required more trials to criterion. The visible reduction in the overlap of odor representations indexes pattern separation. The Arc visualization of odor representations in the anterior piriform network suggests that odor objects are widely distributed representations and can be rapidly modified by reward training in adult rats. We suggest that dynamic changes such as those observed here in piriform odor encoding are at the heart of perceptual learning and reflect the continuing plastic nature of mature associative cortex as an outcome of successful problem solving.
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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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 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".