The CEU Department of Cognitive Science and the Social Mind Center cordially invites you
to its talk by
Carlo Reverberi<http://rc2lab.psico.unimib.it/carloreve/> (RC² Lab, Reasoning and
Cognitive Control Lab, Psychology Department of the University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy).
<http://www.uva.nl/over-de-uva/organisatie/medewerkers/content/e/l/m.vanelk/m.vanelk.html>
Date: Wednesday, September 20, 2017 - 17:00-18:30
Location: Department of Cognitive Science, CEU, Oktober 6 St. 7, room 101
Representation and discovery of task features in human frontal cortex
Humans can organize their thoughts and actions to achieve specific goals by building “task
sets” or “mental programs” describing which are the operations, facts, goals and relations
relevant in a situation. However, how the human brain represents the different and
multiple types of information involved in complex task sets is not fully understood.
In a series of fMRI experiments we explored the neural representation of different task
features: simple stimulus-response rules, priority information, rule hierarchies, logical
relations, and subtask assignment to different people. Furthermore, we explored the
discovery and representation of features possibly relevant for new, yet to be implemented,
rule sets.
Overall, we found that the neural representation of complex rules is “compositional”,
i.e. built on the neural representation of their constituent rules or features. Complex
task sets are “decomposed” in their elementary features. The constituent features are then
represented in different brain structures, depending on the type of information to be
stored. We argue that compositionality, “decomposition” and information-guided
representation are general features of prefrontal cortex functional organization.
The presentation will focus specifically on three recent experiments, on the
representation of the person to whom a subtask was assigned, on the representation of
logical relations, and on the representation of yet-to-be used task features.
We are looking forward to see you at the talk!
Cognitive Science Events at CEU:
http://cognitivescience.ceu.hu/events
Social Mind Center Events at CEU:
http://socialmind.ceu.edu/events
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