The Hippocampus Maps Concept Space, Not Feature Space

The hippocampal formation encodes maps of space and a key question in neuroscience is whether its spatial coding principles also provide a universal metric for the organization of nonspatial, conceptual information. Previous work demonstrated directional coding during navigation through a continuous...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Journal of neuroscience Vol. 40; no. 38; p. 7318
Main Authors: Theves, Stephanie, Fernández, Guillén, Doeller, Christian F
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: United States 16.09.2020
Subjects:
Adult
Concept Formation
Female
Hippocampus - physiology
Humans
Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Male
Spatial Behavior
Spatial Memory
fMRI
learning
conceptual knowledge
hippocampus
spatial coding
ISSN:1529-2401, 1529-2401
Online Access:Get more information
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Summary:The hippocampal formation encodes maps of space and a key question in neuroscience is whether its spatial coding principles also provide a universal metric for the organization of nonspatial, conceptual information. Previous work demonstrated directional coding during navigation through a continuous stimulus feature space as well as mapping of distances in a feature space that was relevant for concept learning. Here we provide the first unambiguous evidence for a hippocampal representation of the actual concept space, by showing that the hippocampal distance signal selectively reflects the mapping of specifically conceptually relevant rather than of all feature dimensions. During fMRI scanning of 32 human participants (21 females), we presented everyday objects, which had beforehand been associated with specific values on three continuous feature dimensions. Crucially, only two dimensions were relevant to prior concept learning. We find that hippocampal responses to the objects reflect their relative distances in a space defined along conceptually relevant dimensions compared with distances in a space defined along all feature dimensions. These findings suggest that the hippocampus supports knowledge acquisition by dynamically encoding information in a space spanned along dimensions that are relevant in relation to define concepts. How are neural representations of conceptual knowledge organized, such that humans are able to infer never experienced relations or categorize new exemplars? Map-like representations as supported by the hippocampal formation to encode physical space during navigation have been suggested as a suitable format. Here we provide the first evidence for a hippocampal representation of a conceptual space compared with a general feature-based space.
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ISSN:1529-2401
1529-2401
DOI:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0494-20.2020