Cesena 6 maggio 2019 ore 11:00
aula A
NTNU (Norwegian University of Science and Technology), Trondheim
Abstract: A cognitive map is a mental representation that assimilates different phenomena in terms of relative locations within an environment. Conceptually, cognitive maps have made a major contribution towards understanding the neurobiology of spatial cognition. Notably, there are also hints that the behavioral relevance of map-like neural coding may extend beyond spatial cognition. To this end, I am interested whether map-like coding provides general principles to understand how the brain flexibly learns different tasks and maintains latent knowledge of the world. I will present findings from behavioral and neuroimaging experiments that leverage our experience exploring the physical world to probe how humans mentally explore scenes, rapidly make a sequence of novel choices, and learn about new people. These findings suggest that brain regions typically linked with integrating first person and environmental spatial cues during navigation, also assimilate knowledge within more abstract metric spaces, including social ones. Mechanistically, these data provide important clues about how cognitive maps may inform decisions by structuring knowledge in terms of abstract coordinates and boundaries that can be translated between events, individuals, and/or locations.