Sex difference in the weighting of expected uncertainty under chronic stress.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Lei H
PROVIDER: S-EPMC8062471 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:Making inference under uncertainty requires an optimal weighting of prior expectations and observations. How this weighting is realized in the brain remains elusive. To investigate this, we recorded functional neuroimaging data while participants estimated a number based on noisy observations. Crucially, the prior expectation about the variability of observations (an expected variability) was manipulated. Consistent with normative models, when novel observations were characterized by higher expected or observed variability, participants' estimates relied more on expectations than novel observations and were characterized by higher stochasticity. Activity in hippocampus increased when novel evidence was characterized by higher expected or observed variability. Response in superior parietal cortex reflected a precision-weighted prediction error signal (i.e., the distance between observations and expectations) that was modulated by hippocampal activity. Our findings implicate the hippocampus during inference under uncertainty, suggesting a role in weighting prior representations over observations and in modulating responsivity of superior parietal cortex to prediction error.
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Project description:Animal models are important tools in scientific research, whereas the animals used are usually single-sex instead of mixed-sex in the experimental design. To better understand the effect of sex difference, we compared several phenotypes between male and female C57BL/6 mice, including behavioral tests, plasma corticosterone levels, adult neurogenesis, and RNA-seq. The experiments were performed under non-stressed and chronic-stressed conditions, respectively. Overall, our results showed several differences between male and female mice in sensorimotor performance while little difference was found in anxiety, depression, learning, and memory. We did not observe a significant difference in adult neurogenesis. There was a sex difference in plasma corticosterone levels under chronic stress conditions, either in 30 min after the restraint stress or after 60min of the recovery. Yet, the corticosterone levels were equivalent between the sexes under non-stressed conditions at any time point. Furthermore, the results of RNA-seq identified the differential expression genes between male and female mice under non-stressed or chronic-stressed conditions.
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