Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex Does Not Play a Selective Role in Pattern Separation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Humans have the capacity to form new memories of events that are, at times, highly similar to events experienced in the past, as well as the capacity to integrate and associate new information within existing knowledge structures. The former process relies on mnemonic discrimination and is believed to depend on hippocampal pattern separation, whereas the latter is believed to depend on generalization signals and conceptual categorization supported by the neocortex. Here, we examine whether and how the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vMPFC) supports discrimination and generalization on a widely used task that was primarily designed to tax hippocampal processes. Ten individuals with lesions to the vMPFC and 46 neurotypical control participants were administered an adapted version of the mnemonic similarity task [Stark, S. M., Yassa, M. A., Lacy, J. W., & Stark, C. E. L. A task to assess behavioral pattern separation (BPS) in humans: Data from healthy aging and mild cognitive impairment. Neuropsychologia, 51, 2442-2449, 2013], which assesses the ability to distinguish previously learned images of everyday objects (targets) from unstudied, highly similar images (lures) and dissimilar images (foils). Relative to controls, vMPFC-lesioned individuals showed intact discrimination of lures from targets but a propensity to mistake studied targets and similar lures for dissimilar foils. This pattern was accompanied by inflated confidence despite low accuracy when responding to similar lures. These findings demonstrate a more general role of the vMPFC in memory retrieval, rather than a specific role in supporting pattern separation.
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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 | 0.003 |
| 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".