Scene Construction and Spatial Processing in Post-traumatic Stress Disorder
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction: Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is associated with hippocampal system structural and functional impairments. Neurobiological models of PTSD posit that contextual memory for traumatic events is impaired due to hippocampal system dysfunction whilst memory of sensory details is enhanced due to amygdalar impact on sensory cortices. If hippocampal system dysfunction is a core feature of PTSD, then non-traumatic hippocampal-dependent cognitive functions such as scene construction, spatial processing, and memory should also be impaired in individuals with PTSD. Methods: = 13) also completed a navigation task in a virtual environment, and underwent structural T1, T2 and diffusion-tensor MRI to quantify gray and white matter integrity. We examined the relationship between spatial processing, neural integrity, and symptom severity in a multiple factor analysis. Results: Overall, patients with PTSD showed impaired performance in both tasks compared to controls. Scenes imagined by patients were less vivid, less detailed, and generated less sense of presence; importantly they had disproportionally reduced spatial coherence between details. Patients also made more errors during virtual navigation. Two components of the multiple factor analysis captured group differences. The first component explained 25% of the shared variance: participants that constructed less spatially coherent scenes also made more navigation errors and had reduced white matter integrity to long association tracts and tracts connecting the hippocampus, thalamus, and cingulate. The second component explained 20% of the variance: participants who generated fewer scene details, with less spatial coherence between them, had smaller hippocampal, parahippocampal and isthmus cingulate volumes. These participants also had increased white matter integrity to the right hippocampal cingulum bundle. Conclusion: Our results suggest that patients with PTSD are impaired at imagining even neutral spatially coherent scenes and navigating through a complex spatial environment. Patients that showed reduced spatial processing more broadly had reduced hippocampal systems volumes and abnormal white matter integrity to tracts implicated in multisensory integration.
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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".