Neuronal baseline shifts underlying boundary setting during free recall
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Asked to freely recall items from a predefined set (e.g., animals), we rarely recall a wrong exemplar (e.g., a vegetable). This capability is so powerful and effortless that it is essentially taken for granted, yet, surprisingly, the underlying neuronal mechanisms are unknown. Here we investigate this boundary setting mechanism using intracranial recordings (ECoG), in 12 patients undergoing epilepsy monitoring engaged in episodic free recall. After viewing vivid photographs from two categories (famous faces and places), patients were asked to freely recall these items, targeting each category in separate blocks. Our results reveal a rapid and sustained rise in neuronal activity ("baseline shift") in high-order visual areas that persists throughout the free recall period and reflects the targeted category. We further show a more transient reactivation linked to individual recall events. The results point to baseline shift as a flexible top-down mechanism that biases spontaneous recall to remain within the required categorical boundaries.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".