ARENA Lecture Series: How Babies Built Concepts: The Role of the Hippocampal-Entorhinal System
Speaker: Dr. Stephanie Theves
Date: 11th October 2024, 13:00 – 14:30
Location: PEG 1G 131, Westend Campus, Goethe University
Abstract
How does the human brain transform experiences into concepts and how do we use those representations flexibly? Recent evidence suggests that the ability to extract commonalities and to mark distinction across experiences to build generalisable knowledge is supported by the same brain mechanisms that create cognitive maps of physical spaces. In my talk I will present a series of behavioral and neuroimaging (fMRI) studies that suggest that the hippocampal-entorhinal system encodes the structure of behaviorally relevant conceptual spaces, thereby supporting processes like rapid updating of category boundaries as well as the abstraction of category prototypes and inference of new states. Finally, I will consider the relation between representational mechanisms in the hippocampus and general cognitive performance.
