How the Brain Works

From behavioral and neuroimaging techniques, researchers at the University College London have traced how conceptual knowledge emerges in the human brain and how it will guide decision making. Man is the only animal able to use prior knowledge and apply them in new situations. This is made possible through the use of concepts, which are formed by abstracting the common essence of several distinct entities, but related. Although there is no doubt that the human form and concepts used constantly, not much is known about how conceptual knowledge is created in the brain or how it guides us to make efficient decisions.Although a Poodle and a Golden Retriever look very different from each other, we can easily appreciate their similar attributes because they can be recognized as instances of a particular concept, in this case, a dog, "says Dharshan Kumaran, lead study author and researcher Center for Neuroimaging Wellcome Trust at the University College London (UK).
For some time, studies suggest that the hippocampus, a brain structure with a unique ability to create networks that allow linking multiple memories, plays an important role in the acquisition of conceptual knowledge, but so far there has been little concrete evidence support this claim.
"Our study shows the ability of people to discover the conceptual structure of their visual experiences, and reveals how the regions called" memory "of the hippocampus collaborate with" decision modules "in the prefrontal lobe to put to use this information," concludes Kumaran.
The research group Kumaran designed an experimental paradigm that has allowed them to track the emergence and application of conceptual knowledge. Participants played a game in which they had the opportunity to win money by correctly predicting whether sun or rain would, based on the appearance of the night sky, represented by patterns on a computer screen.
"At the beginning of the experiment, participants simply memorized the outcome associated with each pattern in isolation," say the authors. "However, instantly realized that groups of patterns were conceptually related. Then, participants were able to solve the task, and even successfully applied their knowledge to a different setting where the concepts were similar, but the patterns themselves were new"