Hippocampal neurogenesis in food‐storing red squirrels: the impact of age and spatial behavior
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
The adaptive significance of adult hippocampal neurogenesis remains unknown. In the laboratory, it is influenced by a variety of environmental and physiological stimuli. In the wild, it may be influenced by the reliance on spatial memory and by environmental stressors. The one common denominator in both settings is that neurogenesis declines markedly with age. Red squirrels are long-lived rodents that store food (thousands of tree cones) to permit survival under harsh winter conditions. We compared a population from the eastern North America that stores its cones singly or in small clusters with one from the west that stores its cones in large stockpiles. The reliance on spatial memory should be much greater in the east than the west, and should not decline with age, as cone storage and recovery is a yearly necessity. We found no difference between the populations in the density of young neurons and both populations showed the same decline with age. Thus, we reject the spatial memory hypothesis for adult neurogenesis in mammals in its original form. Instead, our evidence is consistent with the neurogenic reserve hypothesis in which neuronal cell production early in life leads to enhanced hippocampal function later in life according to environmental demand but without requirement for ongoing cell production as a function of site- and species-specific needs. A more general interpretation of the data leads us to consider a possible role of neurogenesis in novel, flexible episodic memories.
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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 | 0.001 | 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 it