Temporal Gating by Chandelier Cells Encodes Signed Prediction Errors

Overview

1. Institute for Behavioural Neuroscience, Dept. of Experimental Psychology, University College London

Abstract

The brain refines its predictions of the world by updating its internal model whenever sensory input differs from expectation. The sign of this prediction error matters: an unexpected event signals that the model under-predicted (positive error), while a predicted event that fails to occur indicates that the model over-predicted (negative error), and the two should drive opposite synaptic changes. How cortical circuits represent error sign in spiking activity, and how that representation translates into synaptic learning, remain unresolved. We propose the Signed Error by Timing Asymmetry (SETA) model, in which the sign of a prediction error is encoded by when layer 2/3 neurons fire relative to a brief plasticity window in their layer 5 targets. Chandelier cells, an inhibitory cell type recruited by the prediction, impose a temporal clamp on layer 2/3 output: positive errors escape the clamp and arrive within the synaptic potentiation window, while negative errors are released only after the clamp decays and arrive later, during the synaptic depression window. The same circuit, therefore, biases downstream synapses toward either potentiation or depression depending on the prediction-error sign. We demonstrate this signed-error computation in a reduced two-compartment model, test SETA-specific predictions using in vivo recordings from mouse visual cortex, and examine how E/I imbalance leads to pathological consequences in predictive coding.

Reproduced under the paper's license (CC BY), from the paper cited above.

Code

No file of the authors' code could be read here: it is described below, and read at its source.

Code Availability

Simulation and data analysis codes are available from https://github.com/bendor-lab/SETA-model_allen_analysis

Reproduced under the paper's license (CC BY), from the paper cited above.

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Data

Datasets cited

• doi:10.48324/dandi.000713/0.240702.1725, at DANDI; found in the text, “Allen Brain Observatory data analysis”

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Version 1, 27 September 2026: the first record

Recorded: type, journal, 2 authors, 83 references, 1 RRID.

Cite

This paper

Jarzebowski, P., & Bendor, D. (2026). Temporal Gating by Chandelier Cells Encodes Signed Prediction Errors. Research Square (preprint). https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-10384662/v1

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