Tracking the Emergence of Conceptual Knowledge during Human Decision Making

By Dharshan Kumaran, Jennifer J. Summerfield, Demis Hassabis, Eleanor A. Maguire. 2009

269 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Summary Concepts lie at the very heart of intelligence, providing organizing principles with which to comprehend the world. Surprisingly little, however, is understood about how we acquire and deploy concepts. Here, we show that a functionally coupled circuit involving the hippocampus and ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vMPFC) underpins the emergence of conceptual knowledge and its effect on choice behavior. Critically, the hippocampus alone supported the efficient transfer of knowledge to a perceptually novel setting. These findings provide compelling evidence that the hippocampus supports conceptual learning through the networking of discrete memories and reveal the nature of its interaction with downstream valuation modules such as the vMPFC. Our study offers neurobiological insights into the remarkable capacity of humans to discover the conceptual structure of related experiences and use this knowledge to solve exacting decision problems.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience, Sensory Systems

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Citations in the corpus

Toward an Integration of Deep Learning and Neuroscience (2016, positive): “The role of the hippocampus in imagination, concept generation (Kumaran et al., 2009), scene construction (Hassabis and Maguire, 2007), mental exploration and goal-directed path planning (Hopﬁeld, 2009; Ólafsdóttir et al., 2015; Brown et al., 2016) suggests that it could help to create generative…”
Persistent schema-dependent hippocampal-neocortical connectivity during memory encoding and postencoding rest in humans (2010, unknown): “Also, vmPFC activity has recently been linked to representation of conceptual knowledge (37).”
Hippocampal Contributions to Model-Based Planning and Spatial Memory (2019, unknown): “Hippocampal function, of course, extends beyond spatial cognition to support declarative memory and, notably, a role in encoding the relationships among environmental stimuli (Eichenbaum and Cohen, 2004; Davachi and Wagner, 2002; Kumaran et al., 2009; Schapiro et al., 2016; Boorman et al., 2016; Gar”
Generalization of value in reinforcement learning by humans (2012, unknown): “…not often been reported in previous studies of reward learning and decision-making, but this finding is consistent with several more recent reports of value encoding in the hippocampus in categorization and passive viewing tasks (Kumaran et al., 2009; Lebreton et al., 2009; Dickerson et al., 2011).”
The geometry of abstraction in hippocampus and prefrontal cortex (2020, unknown): “The HPC has long been implicated in generating episodic associative memories that could play a central role in creating and maintaining representations of variables in an abstract format (Milner et al., 1998; Eichenbaum, 2004; Wirth et al., 2003; Schapiro et al., 2016; Kumaran et al., 2009).”
Flexible Memories: Differential Roles for Medial Temporal Lobe and Prefrontal Cortex in Cross-Episode Binding (2010, unknown): “Recent evidence has implicated MTL regions in acquisition and use of categorical knowledge (Zeithamova et al., 2008; Kumaran et al., 2009).”
Are The Dorsal and Ventral Hippocampus functionally distinct structures? (2010, unknown): “Another fMRI study by Kumaran et al. (2009) is particularly informative in this regard.”
Interplay of hippocampus and prefrontal cortex in memory (2013, unknown): “For example, correct performance on decisions requiring the use of a recently acquired conceptual rule is associated with increased connectivity between hippocampus and ventromedial prefrontal cortex [65].”
Organizing Conceptual Knowledge in Humans with a Grid-like Code (2016, unknown): “This region has also been shown to correlate with the performance in memory and conceptual knowledge tests(1, 21).”
Brain Mechanisms of Concept Learning (2019, unknown): “Although hippocampal functions offer a powerful toolset for building new concepts (Kumaran et al., 2009; Schapiro et al., 2017), the hippocampus does not act alone.”
Integrating memories to guide decisions (2015, unknown): “Earlier studies of several other integration tasks suggested a similar mechanism [42–44].”
Episodic future thinking reduces reward delay discounting through an enhancement of prefrontal-mediotemporal interactions. (2010, unknown): “In line with these ideas, prefrontal-hippocampal interactions were recently implicated in supporting the incorporation of conceptual information into decision-making processes (Kumaran et al., 2009).”