Simulating stimulus- and TMS-induced interference in short-term memory using a model of prefrontal cortex
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Scalar short-term memory (STM) tasks are those in which the to-be-remembered property of a stimulus can be represented as a scalar quantity – for example, the frequency of a tactile vibration or an auditory pure tone, or the duration or amplitude of a stimulus. Scalar STM tasks have been studied extensively using single-cell methods [1-3], and have proven to be useful model systems for examining behavioural aspects of short-term memory [4-6] and developing computational models [7-10]. In two studies [11,12], we applied a model of prefrontal cortex [9] to experimental datasets [5,13]. In Study 1, we simulated the effects of presenting an irrelevant (distractor) stimulus to experimental subjects during the maintenance period of a vibrotactile scalar STM task by assuming the stimulus was encoded into memory, intruding into the PFC memory store. We were able to replicate previous experimental results [5], and our results also suggested that distractors were only encoded into memory on approximately 50% of trials, consistent with experimental indications that activity in sensory cortex may be inhibited during memory maintenance in order to protect the contents of memory against interference [6,14]. In Study 2, we simulated a previous vibrotactile scalar STM study in which TMS was applied to somatosensory cortex during the maintenance period of the memory task, resulting in decreased performance [13]. We were able to replicate experimental results by assuming that TMS produced increased, noisy neural activity in sensory cortex, which then degraded the contents of the PFC memory store through feedforward interference.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".