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Revealing the structure of affective schematic representations in the medial prefrontal cortex

View ORCID ProfilePhilipp C. Paulus, Ian Charest, Roland G. Benoit
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.08.21.260950
Philipp C. Paulus
aMax Planck Research Group: Adaptive Memory, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany
bInternational Max Planck Research School NeuroCom, Leipzig, Germany
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  • ORCID record for Philipp C. Paulus
  • For correspondence: paulus@cbs.mpg.de
Ian Charest
cSchool of Psychology, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK
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Roland G. Benoit
aMax Planck Research Group: Adaptive Memory, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany
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Abstract

Adaptive cognition is fostered by knowledge about the structure and value of our environment. Here, we hypothesize that these two kinds of information are inherently intertwined as affective schemas in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). Schemas (e.g., of a social network) emerge by extracting commonalities across experiences and can be understood as graphs comprising nodes (e.g., people) and edges (e.g., their relationships). We sampled information about unique real-life environments (i.e., about personally familiar people and places) and probed their neural representations with fMRI. Using representational similarity analysis, we show that the mPFC encodes both, the nodes and the edges of the schema. Critically, the strength of the edges is not only determined by experience and centrality of a given node but also by its affective value. We thus account for the involvement of the mPFC in seemingly disparate functions and suggest that valuation emerges naturally from encoded memory representations.

Competing Interest Statement

The authors have declared no competing interest.

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The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.
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Posted August 21, 2020.
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Revealing the structure of affective schematic representations in the medial prefrontal cortex
Philipp C. Paulus, Ian Charest, Roland G. Benoit
bioRxiv 2020.08.21.260950; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.08.21.260950
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Revealing the structure of affective schematic representations in the medial prefrontal cortex
Philipp C. Paulus, Ian Charest, Roland G. Benoit
bioRxiv 2020.08.21.260950; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.08.21.260950

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