2019 Conference on Cognitive Computational Neuroscience

13-16 September 2019    Berlin, Germany

Technical Program

Paper Detail

Paper: PS-2B.33
Session: Poster Session 2B
Location: H Fläche 1.OG
Session Time: Sunday, September 15, 17:15 - 20:15
Presentation Time:Sunday, September 15, 17:15 - 20:15
Presentation: Poster
Publication: 2019 Conference on Cognitive Computational Neuroscience, 13-16 September 2019, Berlin, Germany
Paper Title: Hexadirectional coding of trajectories through an abstract multidimensional social network during decisions
Manuscript:  Click here to view manuscript
License: Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.32470/CCN.2019.1132-0
Authors: Seongmin Park, Douglas Miller, Erie Boorman, University of California, Davis, United States
Abstract: Recent findings suggest the hippocampal-entorhinal (HPC-ERC) system may serve a general mechanism for representing and navigating cognitive maps of spatial and non-spatial tasks. These map-like representations can be used to guide flexible goal-directed decisions. However, it is unclear whether this system, and the interconnected medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), use the same principles to organize discrete entities along abstract dimensions during decision making in the absence of continuous sensory feedback. During training, participants learned the relationship between 16 entrepreneurs by comparing pairs of entrepreneurs at neighboring ranks in each of two ability dimensions. During fMRI, an entrepreneur was presented with two potential collaborators. Participants were asked to choose the better partner for a given entrepreneur. We found that the level of pattern dissimilarity in the HPC and ERC increased with the pairwise Euclidean distance between entrepreneurs in the 2-D social network, suggesting that separately learned dimensions are integrated into a 2-D cognitive map. Moreover, the ERC, vmPFC, intraparietal area, and posteromedial cortex all display hexadirectional signals for trajectories between entrepreneurs over the reconstructed social space. Our findings show that a grid-like code in the human brain is extended for decision making over an abstract and discrete social space, which may suggest a general mechanism for model-based decisions.