Abstract
Animals demonstrate remarkably flexible behavior when navigating both familiar and novel environments, suggesting they possess internal representations of their surroundings that extend beyond simple stimulus-response associations. These representations, termed cognitive maps by Tolman, provide a framework for understanding how organisms encode and utilize environmental information. The discovery of place cells and grid cells in the rodent hippocampal formation provided the first neural evidence for such cognitive maps, revealing specialized neurons that encode spatial locations and geometric relationships respectively.
Recent functional neuroimaging studies have expanded this framework, demonstrating that humans utilize similar map-like representations for abstract, non-spatial information. These findings suggest that cognitive mapping may be a general neural mechanism for organizing conceptual knowledge. However, direct neural evidence for such abstract cognitive maps in humans remains limited.
We present a novel experimental paradigm designed to investigate the neural basis of abstract cognitive mapping in humans using single-neuron recordings. Our task requires participants to learn associations between characters and simple melodies that can be systematically modified along two parameters. Through training, testing, and inference phases, participants must navigate this abstract melodic space to identify and recall correct character-melody associations. By recording from single neurons during this task, we aim to determine whether the neural encoding of this abstract melodic space exhibits properties similar to those observed in spatial navigation, providing direct evidence for the existence of domain-general cognitive mapping mechanisms in the human brain.
Bio
Dr. Vinícius Carvalho is a postdoctoral researcher at RITMO, University of Oslo, investigating how the human brain processes and predicts auditory information through intracranial recordings. His background is in control engineering and computational neuroscience, and he holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering from UFMG (Brazil). He takes an interdisciplinary approach to understand how the brain processes and represents information, with a research that spans predictive coding, epilepsy, and speech decoding, with current focus on single-neuron recordings in the human hippocampal formation.