Insular cortical circuits as an executive gateway to decipher threat or extinction memory via distinct subcortical pathways
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Threat and extinction memories are crucial for organisms' survival in changing environments. These memories are believed to be encoded by separate ensembles of neurons in the brain, but their whereabouts remain elusive. Using an auditory fear-conditioning and extinction paradigm in male mice, here we discovered that two distinct projection neuron subpopulations in physical proximity within the insular cortex (IC), targeting the central amygdala (CeA) and nucleus accumbens (NAc), respectively, to encode fear and extinction memories. Reciprocal intracortical inhibition of these two IC subpopulations gates the emergence of either fear or extinction memory. Using rabies-virus-assisted tracing, we found IC-NAc projection neurons to be preferentially innervated by intercortical inputs from the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), specifically enhancing extinction to override fear memory. These results demonstrate that IC serves as an operation node harboring distinct projection neurons that decipher fear or extinction memory under the top-down executive control from OFC.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".