Distinct roles of hippocampus and neocortex in symbolic compositional generalization
liang, z.; Glitz, L.; Hefner, M. B.; Lan, D.; Klein-Flugge, M.; Summerfield, C.
Show abstract
Humans can combine symbols to generate new meanings. Here, we studied the regional neural mechanisms that might make this possible. We asked participants to combine two discrete, symbolic features (a shape and a colour) to make a novel spatial inference. BOLD data suggested that the hippocampus encoded elementary visual attributes in a high-dimensional, parallel format that permitted flexible individuation. In ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), posterior parietal cortex (PPC) and primary visual cortex (V1), neural patterns for novel stimuli (composites) could be predicted as a linear combination of signals for familiar stimuli (elements). In vmPFC, this composition occurred in a high-dimensional format, but in PPC and V1, it took place in a low-dimensional, spatial, response-consistent frame of reference. These data offer new insights into the neural circuit underlying compositional generalization.
Matching journals
The top 3 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.
Similar papers in this journal
Similar papers in this journal
- Goal-seeking compresses neural codes for space in the human hippocampus and orbitofrontal cortex 97%
- Entorhinal and ventromedial prefrontal cortices abstract and generalise the structure of reinforcement learning problems 97%
- Joint representation of working memory and uncertainty in human cortex 97%
"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.