Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Wagener, Lysann
• Nieder, Andreas

Titel

Categorical representation of abstract spatial magnitudes in the executive telencephalon of crows

Ist Teil von

• Current biology, 2023-06, Vol.33 (11), p.2151-2162.e5

Ort / Verlag

England: Elsevier Inc

Erscheinungsjahr

2023

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

MEDLINE

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• The ability to group abstract continuous magnitudes into meaningful categories is cognitively demanding but key to intelligent behavior. To explore its neuronal mechanisms, we trained carrion crows to categorize lines of variable lengths into arbitrary “short” and “long” categories. Single-neuron activity in the nidopallium caudolaterale (NCL) of behaving crows reflected the learned length categories of visual stimuli. The length categories could be reliably decoded from neuronal population activity to predict the crows’ conceptual decisions. NCL activity changed with learning when a crow was retrained with the same stimuli assigned to more categories with new boundaries (“short”, “medium,” and “long”). Categorical neuronal representations emerged dynamically so that sensory length information at the beginning of the trial was transformed into behaviorally relevant categorical representations shortly before the crows’ decision making. Our data show malleable categorization capabilities for abstract spatial magnitudes mediated by the flexible networks of the crow NCL. [Display omitted] •Crows classified lines in a match-to-sample task into “short” and “long” categories•NCL neurons encoded category information and category boundaries•NCL activity changed with retraining to reflect new length categories•Malleable categorization is mediated by the flexible networks of the crow NCL Wagener and Nieder show that neurons in the NCL of crows trained to group lines into “short” and “long” categories reflected these magnitude categories in a behaviorally relevant way. Neuronal category representations changed flexibly after retraining a crow with identical stimuli to new categories “short”, “medium”, and “long”.