Maladaptive Properties of Context-Impoverished Memories
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The context in which sudden fearful events occur can be poorly encoded into memory. Yet, the consequences of the resulting context-impoverished memories remain unknown. We demonstrate that restricting the time available for context encoding during contextual fear conditioning causes maladaptively overgeneralized and inextinguishable fear. However, post-conditioning context exposure enables further context encoding through hippocampal reconsolidation-dependent memory updating. Updating in the conditioning context alleviates overgeneralization and restores capacity for extinction. However, updating in a similar safe context erroneously shifts fear from the dangerous to the safe context. We argue that these phenomena can be explained by uncertainty about where events occurred. Moreover, we show that a hippocampal-neocortical neurocomputational model based on this assumption successfully simulates and explains our observations. These findings reveal that context-impoverished memories are maladaptive and can be improved or distorted after recall, with implications for basic memory theory, memory distortion, and treatment of disorders like post-traumatic stress disorder.
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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 | 0.003 |
| 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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".