Institute of Neuroscience, Key Laboratory of Primate Neurobiology, CAS Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, 200031, China.
Collège de France, Paris, France; Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit, CEA DSV/I2BM, INSERM, Université Paris-Sud, Université Paris-Saclay, NeuroSpin Center, 91191, Gif/Yvette, France; Sorbonne Universités, UPMC Univ Paris 06, IFD, 4 place Jussieu, Paris, France.
Neuroimage. 2019 Feb 1;186:245-255. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2018.10.061. Epub 2018 Oct 25.
Memory for spatial sequences does not depend solely on the number of locations to be stored, but also on the presence of spatial regularities. Here, we show that the human brain quickly stores spatial sequences by detecting geometrical regularities at multiple time scales and encoding them in a format akin to a programming language. We measured gaze-anticipation behavior while spatial sequences of variable regularity were repeated. Participants' behavior suggested that they quickly discovered the most compact description of each sequence in a language comprising nested rules, and used these rules to compress the sequence in memory and predict the next items. Activity in dorsal inferior prefrontal cortex correlated with the amount of compression, while right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex encoded the presence of embedded structures. Sequence learning was accompanied by a progressive differentiation of multi-voxel activity patterns in these regions. We propose that humans are endowed with a simple "language of geometry" which recruits a dorsal prefrontal circuit for geometrical rules, distinct from but close to areas involved in natural language processing.
记忆空间序列不仅依赖于要存储的位置数量，还依赖于空间规律的存在。在这里，我们表明，人类大脑通过在多个时间尺度上检测几何规律并以类似于编程语言的格式对其进行编码，从而快速存储空间序列。我们在重复具有可变规则的空间序列时测量了注视预期行为。参与者的行为表明，他们很快在一种包含嵌套规则的语言中发现了每个序列的最简洁描述，并使用这些规则在记忆中压缩序列并预测下一个项目。背外侧前额叶皮层的活动与压缩量相关，而右侧背外侧前额叶皮层则对嵌入结构的存在进行了编码。序列学习伴随着这些区域中多体素活动模式的逐步分化。我们提出，人类具有一种简单的“几何语言”，它为几何规则招募了背外侧前额叶回路，与参与自然语言处理的区域不同但接近。
