Dynamic updating of hippocampal object representations reflects new conceptual knowledge.
Concepts organize the relationship among individual stimuli or events by highlighting shared features. Often, new goals require updating conceptual knowledge to reflect relationships based on different goal-relevant features. Here, our aim is to determine how hippocampal (HPC) object representations are organized and updated to reflect changing conceptual knowledge. Participants learned two classification tasks in which successful learning required attention to different stimulus features, thus providing a means to index how representations of individual stimuli are reorganized according to changing task goals. We used a computational learning model to capture how people attended to goal-relevant features and organized object representations based on those features during learning. Using representational similarity analyses of functional magnetic resonance imaging data, we demonstrate that neural representations in left anterior HPC correspond with model predictions of concept organization. Moreover, we show that during early learning, when concept updating is most consequential, HPC is functionally coupled with prefrontal regions. Based on these findings, we propose that when task goals change, object representations in HPC can be organized in new ways, resulting in updated concepts that highlight the features most critical to the new goal.
Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON M5S 3G3, Canada; mack.michael@gmail.com.
Michael L
ML
Mack
Experimental Psychology, University College London, London WC1H 0AP, United Kingdom.|Alan Turing Institute, London WC1H 0AP, United Kingdom.
Bradley C
BC
Love
Department of Psychology, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712.|Center for Learning and Memory, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712.|Department of Neuroscience, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712.
Alison R
AR
Preston
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D001921:Brain / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging / Q000502:physiology*; D003210:Concept Formation / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007858:Learning; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008297:Male; D008959:Models, Neurological; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D055815:Young Adult
attention; category learning; computational modeling; fMRI; hippocampus