Successful navigation requires the ability to separate memories in a context-dependent manner. For example, to find lost keys, one must first remember whether the keys were left in the kitchen or the office. How does the human brain retrieve the contextual memories that drive behavior?
On Thursday 22nd April, 3.30 pm CET, Professor Stefano Fusi (Columbia University, NY, USA) will give a talk entitled “Are place cells just memory cells?”.
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On Thursday 3rd December 2020, Professor Samuel J. Gershman (Harvard University, MA, USA) will give a talk entitled “Using video games to reverse engineer human intelligence”.
On Thursday 12 November 2020, Professor Eleanor A. Maguire (University College London, UK) will give a talk entitled “Building mental representations: from scenes to events”.
We are sorry to inform you that in view of the coronavirus (COVID-19) crisis this Mind Meeting will be postponed to a later date. We will keep you updated!
How are neural representations of conceptual knowledge organized, such that humans are able to infer never experienced relations or categorize new exemplars?
Map-like representations – as supported by the hippocampus to encode physical space during navigation – have been considered a suitable format. For instance, one might infer whether an unknown animal can fly based on its proximity to familiar animals in a space defined along the feature dimensions ‘body weight’ and ‘wing size’. However, a given animal exhibits many more features than those relevant to its ability to fly. Thus, in order to use a map-like representation to transfer meaning (e.g. able to fly?) to novel information, the map would have to be dynamically refined to the feature dimensions that are currently relevant to the concept.
In our new study we followed up on our 2019 Current Biology paper (Theves et al., 2019) and now show such a distinction between conceptually relevant and overall features for the mapping function of the hippocampus.
Read more about this in the original article:
We are sorry to inform you that in view of the coronavirus (COVID-19) crisis this Mind Meeting will be postponed to a later date. We will keep you updated!
On Thursday 20th August, Prof. Russell Poldrack (Stanford University, USA) will give a talk entitled “What’s wrong with neuroimaging research, and how can we make it right?”.
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