Topic: inferred relationships

Every day we make decisions critical for adaptation and survival. We repeat actions with known consequences. But we can also infer associations between loosely related events to infer and imagine the outcome of entirely novel choices. In the first part of the talk I will show that during successful inference, the mammalian brain uses a hippocampal prospective code to forecast temporally structured learned associations. Moreover, during periods of rest, co-activation of hippocampal cells in sharp-wave/ripples represent inferred relationships that include reward, thereby “joining-the-dots” betwe