Collaborative Research: How Does the Brain Represent Abstract Concepts?

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The ability to reason about the relations between sets of concepts—relational reasoning—gives rise to abstract thought, and has fueled some of humanity’s greatest achievements in science and technology. Although prior research has identified where in the brain relational reasoning takes place, this project pushes the research field by addressing how the brain represents abstract relations. Specifically, the project aims to address three key questions: (1) Can the brain represent an abstract idea independently of the concrete entities that comprise the content of the idea? (2) Do people represent concepts in an abstract manner only when explicitly required to do so, or are abstract relations also retrieved spontaneously? (3) What neural markers reliably predict differences in reasoning capacity between individuals? That is, do individuals whose brains represent abstract relations more readily also tend to have stronger reasoning skills, and/or to perceive meaningful connections that others miss? This project will identify the computational basis for abstract thought and reasoning, thereby creating an opportunity to refine artificial intelligence systems by providing them with more efficient learning mechanisms. This work will inform future research examining how children, and adults as lifelong learners, form representations of abstract concepts. This project integrates recent advances in multivariate fMRI, computational modeling, and behavioral methodology to discover the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying the representation of abstract relations. Research will systematically examine the neural bases of this representation, as well as the influence of task context and individual differences. First, behavioral priming and neural similarity measures, alongside metrics from a computational model of relational reasoning, will characterize the overlap in representation between pairs of concepts that are only abstractly related. Second, manipulation of task demands will determine whether the magnitude, location, and stability of neural representations vary with explicit cognitive instructions. Finally, development of a novel 'neural score' metric will determine neural markers of individual differences in relational reasoning.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.