PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Nelli, Stephanie
AU  - Braun, Lukas
AU  - Dumbalska, Tsvetomira
AU  - Saxe, Andrew
AU  - Summerfield, Christopher
TI  - Neural knowledge assembly in humans and deep networks
AID  - 10.1101/2021.10.21.465374
DP  - 2021 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2021.10.21.465374
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/10/23/2021.10.21.465374.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/10/23/2021.10.21.465374.full
AB  - Human understanding of the world can change rapidly when new information comes to light, such as when a plot twist occurs in a work of fiction. This flexible “knowledge assembly” requires few-shot reorganisation of neural codes for relations among objects and events. However, existing computational theories are largely silent about how this could occur. Here, participants learned a transitive ordering among novel objects within two distinct contexts, before exposure to new knowledge revealing how the contexts were linked. BOLD signals in dorsal frontoparietal cortical areas revealed that objects were rapidly and dramatically rearranged on the neural manifold after minimal exposure to the linking information. We then adapt stochastic online gradient descent to permit similar rapid knowledge assembly in a neural network model.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.