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PERCEPTION

How the mind sees the world

Nature Human Behaviour volume 4, pages 1100–1101 (2020)Cite this article

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From aardvark to zyzzyva, the world we live in is rich and complex. How is this diversity of objects represented in the human mind? Through an experimental and computational tour de force, Hebart et al. show that people share a mental representation of objects based on a small number of meaningful dimensions.

Previous work in cognitive science posited concept representations based on large numbers of binary attributes2 (for example, ‘has fur’) or high-dimensional semantic vector spaces extracted from co-occurrence patterns of related words3. Yet, these types of representations are somewhat at odds with recent theories of neural coding, which propose that the brain employs ‘sparse’ encoding schemes. In these schemes, a particular stimulus is represented by a small subset of activated neurons, each selective for a different relevant feature dimension4. Sparse codes have computational advantages in terms of generalization ability and encoding capacity. They are also well matched to the constraints of biological hardware in terms of connectivity and efficiency. Evidence for sparse representations has been found at different levels in the brain’s simple-to-complex visual processing hierarchy4,5,6 and also in non-visual sensory modalities (for example, in audition7). Yet, while it has been shown how sparse representations (for example, for shape4) can be computed from natural images, the inability to probe the mental space of concepts in a comprehensive and unbiased way had stymied the investigation of sparse codes of concepts.

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References

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  1. Department of Neuroscience, Georgetown University Medical Center, Washington, DC, USA

    Maximilian Riesenhuber

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  1. Maximilian Riesenhuber
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Correspondence to Maximilian Riesenhuber.

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The author declares no conflict of interest.

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Riesenhuber, M. How the mind sees the world. Nat Hum Behav 4, 1100–1101 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-020-00973-x

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