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Poster A13 in Poster Session A - Tuesday, August 6, 2024, 4:15 – 6:15 pm, Johnson Ice Rink
Flexible Hippocampal Representation of Abstract Boundaries Supports Memory-guided Choice
Mariachiara Esposito1 (), Lubna Abdul1, Ameeruddin Ghouse1, Marta Rodriguez Aramendía1, Raphael Kaplan1; 1Universitat Jaume I, Castellón de la Plana, Spain
Cognitive maps represent the location of different spatial cues relative to environmental boundaries. Map-like neural representations in the hippocampus are particularly sensitive to boundary changes, which highlights how cognitive maps can facilitate flexible learning in dynamically changing environments. Notably, cognitive maps in the hippocampus and medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) also represent abstract knowledge. Yet it’s unclear whether map-like knowledge representations in these regions are sensitive to boundary changes in abstract spaces. Here, we use a memory-guided decision-making task to test whether the human hippocampus and mPFC flexibly learn abstract boundary changes in distinct two-dimensional(2D) decision spaces. Despite being unnecessary to accurately make decisions, participants conserve a 2D map-like representation of abstract boundaries after the task, where the precision of their representation relates to prior choice accuracy. Additionally, we find that mPFC and hippocampus represent the euclidean distance to the relevant boundary during decision-making. Testing whether there are brain regions sensitive to changes to the limits of the decision space, we observe flexible hippocampal representation of abstract boundaries that relates to choice accuracy. Taken together, these results highlight the importance of hippocampal boundary representations in facilitating flexible knowledge retrieval across diverse spatial and abstract contexts.
Keywords: cognitive maps learning memory hippocampus