The representational geometry of cognitive maps under dynamic cognitive control

Park, Seongmin A.; Zolfaghar, Maryam; Russin, Jacob; Miller, Douglas S.; O’Reilly, Randall C.; Boorman, Erie D.

doi:10.1101/2023.02.04.527142

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 77 publications

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“…However, much of our social learning outside the lab occurs with respect to some underlying motivation (e.g. making friends, getting a job, seeking information) and several studies have demonstrated how task or goal relevant constraints change how cognitive maps are constructed (Park et al, 2023;Wilson et al, 2014). A promising direction for future work is examining how learning, representation, and memory of people and their relationships changes as a function of such goals.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

People are represented and remembered through their relationships with others

Jolly,

Sadhukha,

Iqbal

et al. 2023

Preprint

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Our memories of episodic experiences are represented and organized by contexts. Events that share overlapping contextual features such as spatio-temporal proximity are more likely to be organized together in our memories. But how do we represent and remember other people? The predominant view in social cognition is that people are represented as a bundle of attributes such as personality traits. However, in real-world contexts we most often learn about others by observing or participating in social interactions, which inform our understanding of interpersonal-relationships. In this study, we explore how people spontaneously represent and remember others after watching a character-driven television show. We find that memory for individual characters is organized around interpersonal relationships rather than person- or situation-specific attributes (i.e., actions, traits, social groups, or locations). Moreover, even the subtle order in which participants recalled the names of each character can be predicted by graphs of that character’s social network. These findings suggest that the way we naturally represent and remember people is largely driven by their connections with others. We believe our work provides new avenues of inquiry that move beyond person-centric approaches in social cognition and a novel perspective on contextual features for memory research.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

People are represented and remembered through their relationships with others

Jolly,

Sadhukha,

Iqbal

et al. 2023

Preprint

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A Transient High-dimensional Geometry Affords Stable Conjunctive Subspaces for Efficient Action Selection

Kikumoto¹,

Bhandari²,

Shibata³

et al. 2023

Preprint

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Flexible action selection requires cognitive control mechanisms capable of mapping the same inputs to diverse output actions depending on goals and contexts. How the brain encodes information to enable this capacity remains one of the longstanding and fundamental problems in cognitive neuroscience. From a neural state-space perspective, solving this problem requires a control representation that can disambiguate similar input neural states, making task-critical dimensions separable depending on the context. Moreover, for action selection to be robust and time-invariant, control representations must be stable in time, thereby enabling efficient readout by downstream processing units. Thus, an ideal control representation should leverage geometry and dynamics that maximize the separability and stability of neural trajectories for task computations. Here, using novel EEG decoding methods, we investigated how the geometry and dynamics of control representations constrain flexible action selection in the human brain. Specifically, we tested the hypothesis that encoding a temporally stable conjunctive subspace that integrates stimulus, response, and context (i.e., rule) information in a high-dimensional geometry achieves the separability and stability needed for context-dependent action selection. Human participants performed a task that requires context-dependent action selection based on pre-instructed rules. Participants were cued to respond immediately at varying intervals following stimulus presentation, which forced responses at different states in neural trajectories. We discovered that in the moments before successful responses, there was a transient expansion of representational dimensionality that separated conjunctive subspaces. Further, we found that the dynamics stabilized in the same time window, and that the timing of entry into this stable and high-dimensional state predicted the quality of response selection on individual trials. These results establish the neural geometry and dynamics the human brain needs for flexible control over behavior.

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The representational geometry of cognitive maps under dynamic cognitive control

Cited by 2 publications

References 77 publications

People are represented and remembered through their relationships with others

People are represented and remembered through their relationships with others

A Transient High-dimensional Geometry Affords Stable Conjunctive Subspaces for Efficient Action Selection

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