Topic: cognitive processes

Understanding how internally driven cognitive processes (COPs) give rise to behavior in different species is one of the key challenges in systems neuroscience. Traditionally, neuroscience has aimed to isolate individual COPs by simplifying sensory stimuli and behavioral readouts. Yet in natural behavior, several COPs can co-occur, often with overlapping neural representations. The dynamics of such superimposed COPs are yet to be understood, as well as the extent to which they generalize across species. To tackle this question, we developed a naturalistic Virtual Reality setup in which two spec

Hierarchical cortical organization unifies the brain’s structural and functional organization, yet its relationship to task-evoked cognitive processes remains unclear. How might intrinsic hierarchical properties shape and constrain the cognitive processes required to perform the wide variety of tasks encountered in daily life? By analyzing a human functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data set with 26 unique cognitive tasks collected per participant, we characterized the geometry and topography of multi-task representations across the cortical hierarchy using representational similarity