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Poster E in Poster Session E: Thursday, August 6, 10:30 am – 12:15 pm, Kimmel Center, Shorin & Rosenthal Rooms

Dissociable temporal sequence-processing deficits from interneuron-specific perturbations in a cortical microcircuit model

Rebeca Ianov-Vitanov¹, Kate Baker¹; ¹University of Cambridge

Presenter: Rebeca Ianov-Vitanov

Excitatory-inhibitory (E/I) imbalance is widely invoked in neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism and schizophrenia, yet its cognitive consequences remain poorly understood at the level of individual interneuron subtypes. Temporal context processing is particularly vulnerable in these populations, but the underlying circuit mechanisms are unclear. A Dale-constrained cortical microcircuit including pyramidal neurons (PYR/E) and three interneuron classes – parvalbumin (PV), somatostatin (SOM), and vasoactive intestinal peptide (VIP) – with population-specific temporal carry states was trained on speech-like sequence classification. PYR carry ablation collapsed context-dependent accuracy to chance; SOM ablation produced a partial deficit; PV and VIP ablations left performance intact. Selective gain suppression revealed dissociable failure modes: VIP suppression caused sharp collapse in context use with elevated distractor susceptibility, while SOM suppression reduced both context benefit and intrusion to near zero, suggesting the context trace is too degraded to be disrupted. Deficits were specific to context-dependent processing, leaving local cue classification intact. These results show that interneuron-subtype dysfunction produces qualitatively distinct cognitive failure modes, framing E/I imbalance as a circuit-level signature. SOM-like dysfunction yields shallow, distraction-resistant context representations, whereas VIP-like dysfunction leads to broader collapse of contextual processing.

Topic Area: Methods, Tools, Theory & Neural Coding