The Structure of Systematicity in the Brain
Abstract
A hallmark of human intelligence is the ability to adapt to new situations by applying learned rules to new content (systematicity) and thereby enabling an open-ended number of inferences and actions (generativity). Here, we propose that the human brain accomplishes these feats through pathways in the parietal cortex that encode the abstract structure of space, events, and tasks and pathways in the temporal cortex that encode information about specific people, places, and things (content). Recent neural network models show how the separation of structure and content might emerge through a combination of architectural biases and learning, and these networks show dramatic improvements over previous models in the ability to capture systematic, generative behavior. We close by considering how the hippocampal formation may form integrative memories that enable rapid learning of new structure and content representations.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Pub Defense Publication
- Publication Date
- Mar 24, 2022
- Source ID
- 10.1177/09637214211049233
Entities
People
- Charan Ranganath
- Jacob L. Russin
- Randall C. O'Reilly
Organizations
- Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford
- National Institute of Mental Health
- Office of Naval Research
- University of California