Temporal Flexibility of Systems Consolidation and the Synaptic Occupancy/Reset Theory (SORT): Cues About the Nature of the Engram
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
The ability to adapt to new situations involves behavioral changes expressed either from an innate repertoire, or by acquiring experience through memory consolidation mechanisms, by far a much richer and flexible source of adaptation. Memory formation consists of two interrelated processes that take place at different spatial and temporal scales, Synaptic Consolidation, local plastic changes in the recruited neurons, and Systems Consolidation, a process of gradual reorganization of the explicit/declarative memory trace between hippocampus and the neocortex. In this review, we summarize some converging experimental results from our lab that support a normal temporal framework of memory systems consolidation as measured both from the anatomical and the psychological points of view, and propose a hypothetical model that explains these findings while predicting other phenomena. Then, the same experimental design was repeated interposing additional tasks between the training and the remote test to verify for any interference: we found that (a) when the animals were subject to a sucession of new learnings, systems consolidation was accelerated, with the disengagement of the hippocampus taking place before the natural time point of this functional switch, but (b) when a few reactivation sessions reexposed the animal to the training context without the shock, systems consolidation was delayed, with the hippocampus prolonguing its involvement in retrieval. We hypothesize that new learning recruits from a fixed number of plastic synapses in the CA1 area to store the engram index, while reconsolidation lead to a different outcome, in which additional synapses are made available. The first situation implies the need of a reset mechanism in order to free synapses needed for further learning, and explains the acceleration observed under intense learning activity, while the delay might be explained by a different process, able to generate extra free synapses: depending on the cognitive demands, it deals either with a fixed or a variable pool of available synapses. The Synaptic Occupancy / Reset Theory (SORT) emerged as an explanation for the temporal flexibility of systems consolidation, to encompass the two different dynamics of explicit memories, as well as to bridge both synaptic and systems consolidation in one single mechanism.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| 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 it