RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Neural knowledge assembly in humans and deep networks
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 2021.10.21.465374
DO 10.1101/2021.10.21.465374
A1 Stephanie Nelli
A1 Lukas Braun
A1 Tsvetomira Dumbalska
A1 Andrew Saxe
A1 Christopher Summerfield
YR 2021
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/11/19/2021.10.21.465374.abstract
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.