ARENA is an interdisciplinary research project aimed at better understanding how (conceptual-semantic) knowledge is organized at different levels of abstraction – both in the brain as well as in AI models, and both in the form of concrete visual objects as well as in their linguistic representation. A central part of this research endeavor is to understand

  • How abstract representations are learned.
  • How these representations are mapped onto decisions in various task contexts.
  • Whether and how these representations are coded in neural activity elicited during human perception.



The ARENA project is jointly carried out by researchers from Goethe University Frankfurt, the Frankfurt Institute of Advanced Studies (FIAS), and the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Saarbrücken.

ARENA repository:
ARENA Zenodo Community is the repository where all the publications, data, and other materials and outcomes of the ARENA projects and the unit will be accessible.

To see the integrated timeline, make sure you’re logged into Twitter/X.