Startle responses elicited by whiplash perturbations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The human startle response produces muscle contractions throughout the body but the most brisk and synchronized contractions appear in the neck muscles. This response, which is greatest with the first exposure to a startling stimulus, could produce excessive and inappropriately directed muscle contractions that could explain the higher incidence of whiplash injuries in people who are unprepared for the collision. This study seeks neurophysiological evidence of startle responses in the neck muscles of 120 healthy subjects exposed to between 1 and 16 rear-end impacts or forward perturbations of different speeds. Startle responses were quantified by the synchronous electromyographic (EMG) activity between 10 and 20 Hz in bilaterally homologous sternocleidomastoid, scalene and cervical paraspinal neck muscles. Coherence analyses of EMGs from the left and right muscles were used to estimate synchrony for: (i) the first unexpected trial, (ii) subsequent habituated trials, and (iii) the superposition of habituated trials and a loud acoustic stimulus (40 ms, 124 dB sound). The peak in coherent EMG activity between contralateral muscle pairs in the 10-20 Hz bandwidth was related to startle. Synchrony in this bandwidth was observed between the left and right muscles during the first impact or whiplash-like perturbation. This synchrony decreased significantly in the habituated trials, but reappeared when the loud acoustic stimulus was introduced. Its presence in the first trial indicates that startle is part of the neuromuscular response to an unexpected rear-end impact. This startle component of the neuromuscular response could play a role in the aetiology of whiplash injuries.
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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 | 0.000 |
| 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".