PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Caitlin R. Bowman
AU  - Takako Iwashita
AU  - Dagmar Zeithamova
TI  - Model-based fMRI reveals co-existing specific and generalized concept representations
AID  - 10.1101/2020.05.26.117507
DP  - 2020 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2020.05.26.117507
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/06/01/2020.05.26.117507.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/06/01/2020.05.26.117507.full
AB  - There has been a long-standing debate about whether categories are represented by individual category members (exemplars) or by the central tendency abstracted from individual members (prototypes). Across neuroimaging studies, there has been neural evidence for either exemplar representations or prototype representations, but not both. In the present study, we asked whether it is possible for individuals to form multiple types of category representations within a single task. We designed a categorization task to promote both exemplar and prototype representations, and we tracked their formation across learning. We found evidence for co-existing prototype and exemplar representations in brain in regions that aligned with previous studies: prototypes in ventromedial prefrontal cortex and anterior hippocampus and exemplars in inferior frontal gyrus and lateral parietal cortex. These findings show that, under the right circumstances, individuals may form representations at multiple levels of specificity, potentially facilitating a broad range of future memory-based decisions.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.