Princeton Neuroscience Institute, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08544, USA; email:
Department of Psychology and Center for Brain Science, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA; email:
Annu Rev Psychol. 2020 Jan 4;71:273-303. doi: 10.1146/annurev-psych-122216-011829. Epub 2019 Sep 24.
Imagine Genghis Khan, Aretha Franklin, and the Cleveland Cavaliers performing an opera on Maui. This silly sentence makes a serious point: As humans, we can flexibly generate and comprehend an unbounded number of complex ideas. Little is known, however, about how our brains accomplish this. Here we assemble clues from disparate areas of cognitive neuroscience, integrating recent research on language, memory, episodic simulation, and computational models of high-level cognition. Our review is framed by Fodor's classic language of thought hypothesis, according to which our minds employ an amodal, language-like system for combining and recombining simple concepts to form more complex thoughts. Here, we highlight emerging work on combinatorial processes in the brain and consider this work's relation to the language of thought. We review evidence for distinct, but complementary, contributions of map-like representations in subregions of the default mode network and sentence-like representations of conceptual relations in regions of the temporal and prefrontal cortex.
想象一下成吉思汗、艾瑞莎·富兰克林和克利夫兰骑士队在毛伊岛表演歌剧。这个荒谬的句子却表达了一个严肃的观点：作为人类，我们可以灵活地生成和理解无数复杂的概念。然而，我们对大脑如何实现这一点知之甚少。在这里，我们从认知神经科学的不同领域收集线索，整合了语言、记忆、情景模拟以及高级认知的计算模型等方面的最新研究。我们的综述以福多尔(Fodor)经典的思维语言假说为框架，根据该假说，我们的思维使用一种非模态的、类似语言的系统来组合和重新组合简单的概念，从而形成更复杂的想法。在这里，我们强调了大脑中组合过程的新兴工作，并考虑了这项工作与思维语言的关系。我们回顾了默认模式网络的子区域中地图样表示和颞叶及前额叶皮质区域中概念关系的句子样表示在不同但互补的贡献方面的证据。
