Flexible neural representations of abstract structural knowledge in the human entorhinal cortex.

ABSTRACT: Humans' ability for generalization is outstanding. It is flexible enough to identify cases where knowledge from prior tasks is relevant, even when many features of the current task are different, such as the sensory stimuli or the size of the task state space. We have previously shown that in abstract tasks, humans can generalize knowledge in cases where the only cross-task shared feature is the statistical rules that govern the task's state-state relationships. Here, we hypothesized that this capacity is associated with generalizable representations in the entorhinal cortex (EC). This hypothesis was based on the EC's generalizable representations in spatial tasks and recent discoveries about its role in the representation of abstract tasks. We first develop an analysis method capable of t

SUBMITTER: Mark S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12945390 | biostudies-literature | 2026 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature