Topic: cognitive operations

At the core of intelligence is the capacity to solve new problems. To do so, the brain must generate novel thoughts and behaviors in a goal-directed manner. This creative capacity has been hypothesized to depend on cognitive operations resembling symbolic grammars, generative models with discrete atomic objects (i.e., symbols) that use rule-based operations to generate newly composed representations. Whether and how symbolic grammars are implemented in neural substrates remains unknown. Here we develop an interdisciplinary approach to study the neural implementation of a grammar for action, ce