How are neural representations of conceptual information structured such that people may deduce relationships they have never seen or classify fresh examples? It has been argued that a viable format for encoding physical space during navigation is a representation that resembles a map. Previous research showed distance mapping in a feature space that was significant for concept learning as well as directional coding during navigation across a continuous stimulus feature space. In contrast to a broad feature-based environment, Stephanie Theves et al. present the first evidence in their study for a hippocampus representation of a conceptual space.
We provide the first unambiguous evidence for a hippocampal representation of the actual concept space, by showing that the hippocampal distance signal selectively reflects the mapping of specifically conceptually relevant rather than of all feature dimensions.
The researchers displayed common items that have previously been linked with particular values on three continuous feature dimensions while fMRI scanning 32 human subjects (21 females). Importantly, prior concept learning was only important across two dimensions. In contrast to distances in a space defined along all feature dimensions, they discovered that hippocampus responses to the objects reflect their relative distances in a space defined along cognitively significant dimensions. According to these results, the hippocampus aids in the acquisition of knowledge by dynamically storing data in a space that is spanned along dimensions that are important for defining ideas.


Their architecture allowed for the description of object connections in both a three-dimensional feature space defined along all stimulus dimensions and a two-dimensional concept space defined along just conceptually important stimulus dimensions. They discovered that hippocampus representations of things learned previously mirrored their conceptual distances rather than their feature-based distances. The two-dimensional distances in concept space also significantly outperformed alternative two-dimensional distances derived from combinations with the conceptually irrelevant feature dimension in their ability to explain the hippocampal signal, ruling out the possibility that this effect was caused by a hippocampus that prefers two dimensions for coding.
The hippocampal signal thus reflects only a representation of distances in a space spanned by the dimensions that were relevant in relation to one another to define the concept, while the mnemonically relevant third dimension was not integrated in a multidimensional representation.
This supports the argument that the hippocampus organizes new information in a map-like representation in support of concept learning and it can carve out (and represent) conceptual information from the totality of features, despite encoding specific exemplars in all detail.
The Hippocampus Maps Concept Space, Not Feature Space. Stephanie Theves, Guillén Fernández and Christian F. Doeller.
Published: September 2020
DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0494-20.2020