Stress impacts sensory variability through cortical sensory activity motifs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Medically unexplained symptoms in depression are common. These individual-specific complaints are often considered an 'idiom of distress', yet animal studies suggest that cortical sensory representations are flexible and influenced by spontaneous cortical activity. We hypothesized that stress would reveal activity dynamics in somatosensory cortex resulting in greater sensory-evoked response variability. Using millisecond resolution in vivo voltage sensitive dye (VSD) imaging in mouse neocortex, we characterized spontaneous regional depolarizations within limb and barrel regions of somatosensory cortex, or spontaneous sensory motifs, and their influence on sensory variability. Stress revealed an idiosyncratic increase in spontaneous sensory motifs that is normalized by selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor treatment. Spontaneous motif frequency is associated with increased variability in sensory-evoked responses, and we optogenetically demonstrate that regional depolarization in somatosensory cortex increases sensory-evoked variability for seconds. This reveals a putative circuit level target for changes in sensory processing and for unexplained physical complaints in stress-related psychopathology.
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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".