Role of Thalamocortical Sensory Suppression during Arousal: Focusing Sensory Inputs in Neocortex
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The thalamus serves as a gate that regulates the flow of sensory inputs to the neocortex, and this gate is controlled by neuromodulators from the brainstem reticular formation that are released during arousal. We found recently that sensory-evoked responses are suppressed in the neocortex during arousal. This sensory suppression results from the activity-dependent depression of the thalamocortical connection caused by increased tonic firing of thalamocortical cells during arousal. In the present study, the functional consequences of thalamocortical suppression during arousal were investigated using the vibrissae system of rodents. The results show that thalamocortical suppression is associated with a strong reduction in the spread of sensory inputs through the cortex, thus reducing the size of sensory representations. In addition, when the responses of single cells to principal and adjacent whiskers are compared, the response to the adjacent whiskers was found to be strongly suppressed, much more so than that of principal whiskers. Consequently, the receptive fields of cortical neurons become more focused to the principal whisker. The results indicate that thalamocortical suppression during arousal serves to focus sensory inputs to their appropriate representations in neocortex, which may be computationally helpful for the spatial processing of sensory information.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| 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) | 0.001 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".