The geometry of abstraction in hippocampus and pre-frontal cortex
Stefano Fusi · Columbia University
Fri, Oct 16, 2020 · 06:00 UTC
The curse of dimensionality plagues models of reinforcement learning and decision-making. The process of abstraction solves this by constructing abstract variables describing features shared by different specific instances, reducing dimensionality and enabling generalization in novel situations. Here we characterized neural representations in monkeys performing a task where a hidden variable described the temporal statistics of stimulus-response-outcome mappings. Abstraction was defined operationally using the generalization performance of neural decoders across task conditions not used for tr