PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Stephanie Nelli
AU  - Lukas Braun
AU  - Tsvetomira Dumbalska
AU  - Andrew Saxe
AU  - Christopher Summerfield
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/2021/11/19/2021.10.21.465374.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/11/19/2021.10.21.465374.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 that revealed how they 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 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.