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Poster E in Poster Session E: Thursday, August 6, 10:30 am – 12:15 pm, Kimmel Center, Shorin & Rosenthal Rooms

Hippocampal map-like knowledge transfer between spatial and abstract domains

Mariachiara Esposito¹, Marta Rodríguez Aramendía¹, Raphael Kaplan¹; ¹Universitat Jaume I

Presenter: Raphael Kaplan

Cognitive maps putatively help extrapolate relational knowledge from one situation to another. Despite mounting evidence for spatial and abstract map-like knowledge representations in the hippocampus, whether humans flexibly transfer these knowledge representations between spatial and non-spatial tasks is unclear. We tested if the human hippocampus and medial prefrontal cortex(mPFC) support map-like knowledge transfer between spatial and abstract domains. In interleaved tasks, subjects viewed paintings to infer two abstract attributes or their spatial location in a gallery, where paintings sometimes conserved the same relative position in both tasks. The hippocampus and mPFC represented the distance between paintings in both abstract and physical spaces. Testing for transfer of position codes, the hippocampus selectively conserved a generalized representation of stimuli position. In contrast, mPFC tracked a conjunction of transfer-related variables. These results suggest the hippocampus generalizes map-like representations across domains and mPFC reflects latent task structure to support flexible knowledge transfer.

Topic Area: Memory, Learning & Knowledge Structures