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Neuroscience

Dynamic categories

Nature volume 412, pages 693–694 (2001)Cite this article

Neuroscientists often study brain function by presenting a stimulus many times and averaging the neural response. A trick for finding brain activity in single trials might reveal how animals mentally categorize information.

One of the most enduring problems in biology is that of how the brain assigns meaning to the stimuli it receives. We naturally divide the world into convenient categories, but the brain mechanisms that underlie this ability are poorly understood. On page 733 of this issue, Ohl and colleagues1 report that category formation in animals is accompanied by fleeting but identifiable patterns of brain activity. The patterns exist for only a fraction of a second, and would be dismissed as noise by more traditional methods of analysis. Ohl et al.'s powerful technique may eventually reveal whether and how similar patterns contribute to our own cognitive abilities.

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Figure 1: Detecting the brain activity that underlies the formation of categories.

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  1. School of Human Development, University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, 75083, Texas, USA

    Michael P. Kilgard

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  1. Michael P. Kilgard
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Correspondence to Michael P. Kilgard.

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Kilgard, M. Dynamic categories. Nature 412, 693–694 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1038/35089173

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/35089173

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