Dr. Simone Viganò | Navigating conceptual knowledge across reference frames

Project Presentation (internal)

  • Date: Jun 14, 2021
  • Time: 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Dr. Simone Viganò
  • Department of Psychology / CIMeC Center for Mind/Brain Sciences, University of Trento, Rovereto (TN), Italy
  • Location: MPI for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences
  • Room: Zoom Meeting
  • Host: Department of Psychology
  • Contact: vigano@cbs.mpg.de
Previous research has shown that, under some specific circumstances, humans use similar neural mechanisms for navigating both spatial and conceptual spaces. Specifically, it has been found that conceptual knowledge can be partially organised according to low-dimensional representational geometries typical of spatial navigation, allowing agents to form internal representations as points in conceptual spaces of one or two dimensions. Two complementary systems support our representation of spatial knowledge during navigation: the hippocampal formation mostly represents how objects in the environment relate to each other, and thus supports the so-called world-centered or allocentric cognitive map; on the contrary, the parietal cortex mostly represents the relations between other objects and ourselves, thus providing a self-centered or egocentric reference frames. While several studies have now reported the existence of allocentric cognitive maps for conceptual spaces, evidence for the recruitment of egocentric codes for representing conceptual knowledge is to date limited to the cases of numbers and time, two knowledge domains that we explicitly refer to, in our language, with spatial terms. The present research has the overarching goal of investigating the neural representation of conceptual spaces across different reference frames, with a specific focus on egocentric goal-directed representations. We will recruit healthy adults and test them using computer-based behavioural tasks and functional magnetic resonance imaging to describe whether and how typical signatures of egocentric representational codes can be detected in their behaviour and neural activity when processing conceptual information.
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