[S5] Symposium 5: Space-time interference in behavior and neuronal processing

11:45 AM - 12:00 PM JST(2:45 AM - 3:00 AM UTC)

[S5-05] A different angle on space-time interference: Disentangling cognitive maps and graphs in the human brain

*Yangwen Xu¹, Max A.B. Hinrichs¹, Roberto Bottini², Christian F Doeller^1,3 (1. Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences (Germany), 2. Center for Mind/Brain Sciences, University of Trento (Italy), 3. Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience (Norway))

Keywords:

space-time interference

Our mental representations can be structured into two basic formats. One is cognitive maps, where representational contents are arranged in a space and encoded as coordinates. The other is cognitive graphs, where representational contents are associated through co-occurrence in time and encoded among relations. However, these two forms of representations are usually correlated and confounded, making their neural underpinnings challenging to verify. For example, the "place cells" found in the hippocampus, which fire at particular locations in an environment, can also be interpreted as "time cells", which fire following a particular temporal sequence. In this symposium, I will present our recent fMRI study aiming to illuminate this puzzle. We let participants learn a virtual environment of an Euclidean graph where map and graph information is orthogonalized, and the neural underpinnings of these two forms of mental representations were unraveled using both univariate and multivariate fMRI methods.