Balaguer Jan, Spiers Hugo, Hassabis Demis, Summerfield Christopher
Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3UD, UK; Google Deepmind, London EC4A 3TW, UK.
Department of Experimental Psychology, University College London, London WC1E 6BT, UK.
Neuron. 2016 May 18;90(4):893-903. doi: 10.1016/j.neuron.2016.03.037.
Planning allows actions to be structured in pursuit of a future goal. However, in natural environments, planning over multiple possible future states incurs prohibitive computational costs. To represent plans efficiently, states can be clustered hierarchically into "contexts". For example, representing a journey through a subway network as a succession of individual states (stations) is more costly than encoding a sequence of contexts (lines) and context switches (line changes). Here, using functional brain imaging, we asked humans to perform a planning task in a virtual subway network. Behavioral analyses revealed that humans executed a hierarchically organized plan. Brain activity in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex and premotor cortex scaled with the cost of hierarchical plan representation and unique neural signals in these regions signaled contexts and context switches. These results suggest that humans represent hierarchical plans using a network of caudal prefrontal structures. VIDEO ABSTRACT.
规划使行动能够为追求未来目标而有序进行。然而，在自然环境中，对多种可能的未来状态进行规划会产生高昂的计算成本。为了高效地表示规划，状态可以按层次聚类为“情境”。例如，将穿越地铁网络的行程表示为一系列单独的状态（站点），比编码一系列情境（线路）和情境转换（换乘线路）成本更高。在此，我们利用功能性脑成像技术，让人类在虚拟地铁网络中执行一项规划任务。行为分析表明，人类执行的是一个层次组织的规划。背内侧前额叶皮层和运动前区皮层的脑活动与层次规划表示的成本成正比，这些区域独特的神经信号表明了情境和情境转换。这些结果表明，人类使用尾侧前额叶结构网络来表示层次规划。视频摘要。
