Brain areas for reversible symbolic reference, a potential singularity of the human brain.

ABSTRACT: The emergence of symbolic thinking has been proposed as a dominant cognitive criterion to distinguish humans from other primates during hominisation. Although the proper definition of a symbol has been the subject of much debate, one of its simplest features is bidirectional attachment: the content is accessible from the symbol, and vice versa. Behavioural observations scattered over the past four decades suggest that this criterion might not be met in non-human primates, as they fail to generalise an association learned in one temporal order (A to B) to the reverse order (B to A). Here, we designed an implicit fMRI test to investigate the neural mechanisms of arbitrary audio-visual and visual-visual pairing in monkeys and humans and probe their spontaneous reversibility. After learning a

SUBMITTER: van Kerkoerle T 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11820117 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature