Hm. I’m still confused, especially by the word “attention”—normally this makes me think of attention-by-the-rat-modeled-as-an-agent, but in this case I think it’s really attention-by-the-rat’s-brain-modeled-as-a-signal-denoiser.
The rat paying attention_1 to pups is a consequence of the brain circuitry paying attention_2 to pup cries, but this glosses over the mechanism. Oxytocin can serve as a “hey, something important is happening” signal (more specific if there are more channels the hardwired mechanism can use to pick out the source of the stimulus—e.g. innate tracking of certain objects can help pick out those objects for the learned model) that causes the auditory cortex to learn to attend_2 to pup cries.
But this modeling needs to be connected to motivation and the correct pup-related behaviors somehow. And so I’m still confused about the virgin rats. Was purely the oxytocin sufficient by itself (in which case it seems like just paying attention to pups was either enough to trigger further learning/motivational cascades, or it was immediately hooked into a motivational structure that was just “waiting for it”), or did it merely help along a larger process of which it’s only one signalling mechanism?
Yeah, I meant attention_2. My current theory is that oxytocin makes the mouse generally more attentive to sounds, regardless of whether it’s pup sounds, predator sounds, other adult mice, irrelevant background noise, anything. I just moved some text from Footnote 5 into the main text of the Theory 5 assessment elaborating on why I believe that.
I think you’re confused because you’re expecting my post to have a discussion of how pup-retrieval works, whereas my post is actually discussing more specifically the role of oxytocin neurons in primary auditory cortex. And my conclusion is that the latter is not playing a central role in the former. It’s involved, apparently, but it’s not centrally involved. The stars of the show are elsewhere in the brain, I claim, and they’re out-of-scope for this post.
(I have two guesses for why oxytocin-free auditory cortex reduces pup-retrieval in virgins. One involves the auditory cortex sending information / signals to brainstem inferior colliculus, and the other involves the auditory cortex sending information / signals to some subregion(s) within the amygdala or mPFC or ventral striatum. Again, it’s out-of-scope for this post.)
Hm. I’m still confused, especially by the word “attention”—normally this makes me think of attention-by-the-rat-modeled-as-an-agent, but in this case I think it’s really attention-by-the-rat’s-brain-modeled-as-a-signal-denoiser.
The rat paying attention_1 to pups is a consequence of the brain circuitry paying attention_2 to pup cries, but this glosses over the mechanism. Oxytocin can serve as a “hey, something important is happening” signal (more specific if there are more channels the hardwired mechanism can use to pick out the source of the stimulus—e.g. innate tracking of certain objects can help pick out those objects for the learned model) that causes the auditory cortex to learn to attend_2 to pup cries.
But this modeling needs to be connected to motivation and the correct pup-related behaviors somehow. And so I’m still confused about the virgin rats. Was purely the oxytocin sufficient by itself (in which case it seems like just paying attention to pups was either enough to trigger further learning/motivational cascades, or it was immediately hooked into a motivational structure that was just “waiting for it”), or did it merely help along a larger process of which it’s only one signalling mechanism?
Yeah, I meant attention_2. My current theory is that oxytocin makes the mouse generally more attentive to sounds, regardless of whether it’s pup sounds, predator sounds, other adult mice, irrelevant background noise, anything. I just moved some text from Footnote 5 into the main text of the Theory 5 assessment elaborating on why I believe that.
I think you’re confused because you’re expecting my post to have a discussion of how pup-retrieval works, whereas my post is actually discussing more specifically the role of oxytocin neurons in primary auditory cortex. And my conclusion is that the latter is not playing a central role in the former. It’s involved, apparently, but it’s not centrally involved. The stars of the show are elsewhere in the brain, I claim, and they’re out-of-scope for this post.
(I have two guesses for why oxytocin-free auditory cortex reduces pup-retrieval in virgins. One involves the auditory cortex sending information / signals to brainstem inferior colliculus, and the other involves the auditory cortex sending information / signals to some subregion(s) within the amygdala or mPFC or ventral striatum. Again, it’s out-of-scope for this post.)