How the Brain Generalizes Knowledge Across Contexts

This piece, by Onno Berkan, was published on 11/19/24. The original text, by Mark et al., was put up for review by eLife on 09/05/24.

This UCL study developed and validated a new "subspace generalization" method to understand how the brain, specifically the entorhinal cortex (EC), transfers knowledge across different situations.

Researchers found that the entorhinal cortex could generalize representations across abstract graphs of different sizes and with different stimuli, similar to how grid cells function in physical space. This suggests that the EC can maintain consistent activity patterns when processing similar structural information, even when the specific details (like size or visual elements) change.

Interestingly, this generalization ability did not extend to more complex graph structures, and the researchers acknowledged some experimental limitations on this end.

The study supported theoretical predictions about the EC's role in structure generalization. The findings demonstrated that EC codes can generalize across non-spatial tasks that share common structural regularities, regardless of the similarity of sensory stimuli and network size.

The findings are important to understanding how the brain represents and generalizes abstract structural knowledge. The study expands on previous work by showing that EC plays a crucial role in generalizing across abstract tasks governed by the same statistical rules, even when the tasks aren't based on the same underlying structure.

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