Revealing the structure of affective schematic representations in the medial prefrontal cortex
Paulus, P. C.; Charest, I.; Benoit, R. G.
Show abstract
Adaptive cognition is fostered by knowledge about the structure and value of our environment. Here, we hypothesize that these two kinds of information are inherently intertwined as value-weighted schemas in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). Schemas (e.g., of a social network) emerge by extracting commonalities across experiences and can be understood as graphs comprising nodes (e.g., people) and edges (e.g., their relationships). We sampled information about unique real-life environments (i.e., about personally familiar people and places) and probed the neural representations of their schemas with fMRI. Using representational similarity analysis, we show that the mPFC encodes indeed both, the nodes and edges of the schemas. Critically, as hypothesized, the strength of the edges is not only determined by experience and centrality of a node but also by value. We thus account for the involvement of the mPFC in disparate functions and suggest that valuation emerges naturally from encoded memory representations.
Matching journals
The top 4 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.
Similar papers in this journal
Similar papers in this journal
- Suppression weakens unwanted memories via a sustained reduction of neural reactivation 96%
- Large-scale neural dynamics in a shared low-dimensional state space reflect cognitive and attentional dynamics 96%
- Social navigation: distance and grid-like codes support navigation of abstract social space in the human brain 95%
Similar papers in this journal
- Dynamically shifting from compositional to conjunctive brain representations supports cognitive task learning 96%
- Goal congruency dominates reward value in accounting for behavioral and neural correlates of value-based decision-making 96%
- Multimodal Gradients Unify Local And Global Cortical Organization 95%
Similar papers in this journal
- Endogenous variation in ventromedial prefrontal cortex state dynamics during naturalistic viewing reflects affective experience 97%
- Neural mechanisms of resource allocation in working memory 96%
- When self comes to a wandering mind: Brain representations and dynamics of self-generated concepts in spontaneous thought 95%
"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.