Map-Like Representations of an Abstract Conceptual Space in the Human Brain

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Much of higher cognition involves abstracting away from sensory details and thinking conceptually. How do our brains learn and represent such abstract concepts? Recent work has proposed that neural epresentations in the medial temporal lobe (MTL), which are involved in spatial navigation, might also support learning of higher-level knowledge structures (Behrens et al., 2018; Bellmund et al.,2018). Under this view, a range of MTL neurons such as place cells, grid cells, and head-direction cells may support the ability to mentally “navigate” through conceptual space. This extends the original proposal by Tolman (1948) that people construct “cognitive maps” that support broad psychological functions, and offers the exciting potential of understanding the cognitive processes that underlie category learning, reinforcement learning and spatial navigation under a single unified framework.