Circadian fluctuations in glucocorticoid level predict perceptual discrimination sensitivity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Slow neurobiological rhythms, such as the circadian secretion of glucocorticoid (GC) hormones, modulate a variety of body functions. Whether and how endocrine fluctuations also exert an influence on perceptual abilities is largely uncharted. Here, we show that phasic increases in GC availability prove beneficial to auditory discrimination. In an age-varying sample of N = 68 healthy human participants, we characterize the covariation of saliva cortisol with perceptual sensitivity in an auditory pitch discrimination task at five time points across the sleep-wake cycle. First, momentary saliva cortisol levels were captured well by the time relative to wake-up and overall sleep duration. Second, within individuals, higher cortisol levels just prior to behavioral testing predicted better pitch discrimination ability, expressed as a steepened psychometric curve. This effect of GCs held under a set of statistical controls. Our results pave the way for more in-depth studies on neuroendocrinological determinants of sensory encoding and perception.
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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 | 0.002 |
| 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 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".