Dynamics of Hierarchical Task Representations

By Dillan Cellier, I. Petersen, Kai Hwang. Journal of Neuroscience, 2022

16 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Task representations are critical for cognitive control and adaptive behavior. The hierarchical organization of task representations allows humans to maintain goals, integrate information across varying contexts, and select potential responses. In this study we characterized the structure and interactive dynamics of task representations that facilitate cognitive control. Human participants (both males and females) performed a hierarchical task that required them to select a response rule while considering the contingencies from different contextual inputs. By applying time- and frequency-resolved representational similarity analysis to human electroencephalography data, we characterized properties of task representations that are otherwise difficult to observe. We found that participants formed multiple representations of task-relevant contexts and features from the presented stimuli, beyond simple stimulus–response mappings. These disparate representations were hierarchically structured, with higher-order contextual representations dominantly influencing subordinate representations of task features and response rules. Furthermore, this cascade of top-down interactions facilitated faster responses. Our results describe key properties of task representations that support hierarchical cognitive control. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Humans can adjust their actions in response to contingencies imposed by the environment. Although it has long been hypothesized that this ability depends on mental representations of tasks, the neural dynamics of task representations have been difficult to characterize. Our study used electroencephalography data from human participants to demonstrate the neural organization and interactive dynamics of task representations. Our results revealed a top-down, hierarchically organized representational structure that encoded multiple contexts and features from the environment. To support cognitive control, higher-level contextual representations influenced subordinate representations of task-relevant features and potential responses, facilitating response selection in a context-dependent manner. Our results provide direct evidence of organizational properties of task representations, which are cornerstones of cognitive control theories.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

View Paper: https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0233-22.2022

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Citations in the corpus

Predictive processing as a scalable computational principle for embodied multitask intelligence (2026, unknown): “The model reproduced properties often observed in humans: hierarchical task representation ( 44 – 49 ), inference of occluded states, and reliance on proprioception to maintain robust object manipulation when visual information is ambiguous, such as in dimly lit environments.”
Choosing How to Remember: Adaptive Memory Structures for LLM Agents (2026, unknown): “…leads to suboptimal performance, as different tasks exhibit distinct structural characteristics and interaction patterns (Trach & McDougle, 2025; Cellier et al., 2022; Zhang et al., 2025b), such as topic evolution, temporal progression, and relational dependencies, that often co-occur in…”
Hierarchical Reconfiguration of Neurocognitive Task Set Representations Mediates Cognitive Flexibility (2026, unknown): “Yet the same system can also support high flexibility by integrating and updating sensory-motor representations under changing contexts (Kikumoto & Mayr, 2020; Kikumoto et al., 2024) and redirecting attention toward alternative task rules or stimuli dimensions (Cellier et al., 2022).”
Frontoparietal Hubs Leverage Probabilistic Representations and Integrated Uncertainty to Guide Cognitive Flexibility (2025, unknown): “To achieve goals, humans construct rich cognitive representations that capture rule structures and contextual contingencies (1, 2).”
Mental graphs structure the storage and retrieval of visuomotor associations (2025, unknown): “Specifically, research with behavioural and neural recording methods has not found evidence of sequential pruning of potential responses during hierarchically structured cognitive control tasks 51,52 .”
Novel Verbal Instructions Recruit Abstract Neural Patterns of Time-Variable Information Dimensionality (2025, methodology): “In these, more information dichotomies were separable, indicating higher-dimensional neural codes.”
Learning reshapes the hippocampal representation hierarchy (2024, unknown): “The cognitive benefits of hierarchical representation structures have been described in multiple studies in humans and other animals ( 20 , 44 , 53 – 55 ): They allow prioritization of variables according to their relevance for behavior.”
Thalamocortical contributions to hierarchical cognitive control (2024, methodology): “Critically, our design allowed us to dissociate different representations without comparing conditions with varying stimuli complexity, difficulty, or response requirements (Cellier et al., 2022).”
Task Switch Costs Scale with Dissimilarity between Task Rules (2024, background): “For task rules, larger switch cost for higher-level task rule in a hierarchy of task rules has been documented (Cellier, Petersen, & Hwang, 2022; Collins, Cavanagh, & Frank, 2014).”
Multiplexed Levels of Cognitive Control through Delta and Theta Neural Oscillations (2024, background): “Time – frequency decoding procedures have shown that neural signals at frequencies between the delta and theta frequency range (1 – 8 Hz) carry information about task-relevant contexts, features, and response-rule representations (Cellier, Petersen, & Hwang, 2022).”
UC Merced Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (background): “Some behavioral and neural work has challenged this ‘bottleneck’ view, providing evidence of parallel processing of information at different task levels (Cellier et al., 2022; Ranti et al., 2015).”