Organizing Conceptual Knowledge in Humans with a Grid-like Code

By A. Constantinescu, J. O’Reilly, Timothy Edward John Behrens. Science, 2016

762 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Coding abstract concepts in the brain Grid cells are thought to provide the neuronal code that underlies spatial knowledge in the brain. Grid cells have mostly been studied in the context of path integration. However, recent theoretical studies have suggested that they may have a broader role in the organization of general knowledge. Constantinescu et al. investigated whether the neural representation of concepts follows a structure similar to the representation of space in the entorhinal cortex. Several brain regions, including the entorhinal cortex and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, showed gridlike neural representation of conceptual space. Science, this issue p. 1464 Grid cells in the brain can also represent nonspatial knowledge. It has been hypothesized that the brain organizes concepts into a mental map, allowing conceptual relationships to be navigated in a manner similar to that of space. Grid cells use a hexagonally symmetric code to organize spatial representations and are the likely source of a precise hexagonal symmetry in the functional magnetic resonance imaging signal. Humans navigating conceptual two-dimensional knowledge showed the same hexagonal signal in a set of brain regions markedly similar to those activated during spatial navigation. This gridlike signal is consistent across sessions acquired within an hour and more than a week apart. Our findings suggest that global relational codes may be used to organize nonspatial conceptual representations and that these codes may have a hexagonal gridlike pattern when conceptual knowledge is laid out in two continuous dimensions.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Developmental and Educational Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5d83dd7bc824f76ec5d88cc05488331ae9359794

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Citations in the corpus

Navigating cognition: Spatial codes for human thinking (2018, background): “Similarly, the role played by networks of brain regions acting in concert with the hippocampus (32, 63, 73, 74) for cognitive spaces and differences in the encoding of multidimensional stimulus spaces in other brain regions—for example, during face processing in monkey inferotemporal cortex (158)—sh”
Attractor and integrator networks in the brain (2021, background): “Consistent with this idea, it appears that the brain can use grid and place cells interchangebly when navigating through either the spatial environment or through non-spatial cognitive domains [78, 79, 80].”
Neuroscience-Inspired Artificial Intelligence. (2017, background): “Using functional neuroimaging, the researchers provide evidence for the existence of such codes while humans performed an abstract categorization task, supporting the view that periodic encoding is a generalized hallmark of human knowledge organization (Constantinescu et al., 2016).”
Learning Structures: Predictive Representations, Replay, and Generalization (2020, background): “For instance, inconsistent with merely spatial structures, place and grid fields capture non-spatial state spaces as well [7 ,8,9].”
Human Replay Spontaneously Reorganizes Experience (2019, background): “It has been theorized that such inferences rely on internal models of the world, which are supported by the same neural mechanisms underpinning relational reasoning in space (Behrens et al., 2018; Buzsáki and Moser, 2013; Constantinescu et al., 2016; Eichenbaum, 2017; Tolman, 1948).”
If deep learning is the answer, what is the question? (2020, background): “There are even hints that this coding scheme may apply to non-spatial as well as spatial domains 92 , potentially laying the foundations for a theory of higher-order human reasoning 112 .”
Ensembles in medial and lateral orbitofrontal cortex construct cognitive maps emphasizing different features of the behavioral landscape (2017, background): “…with the idea that the prefrontal cortex generally and the orbitofrontal cortex specifically is involved in constructing cognitive maps in order to promote, as is classically claimed, the flexible organization of behavior (Constantinescu et al., 2016; Fuster, 1997; Wikenheiser & Schoenbaum, 2016).”
A map of abstract relational knowledge in the human hippocampal–entorhinal cortex (2017, background): “DOI: 10.7554/eLife.17086 1 of 20 dimensional abstract spaces are formed from continuous dimensions (Constantinescu et al., 2016; Tavares et al., 2015).”