Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

  • Research Highlight
  • Published:

Neural coding

Disentangling human inference

Nature Reviews Neuroscience volume 25, page 645 (2024)Cite this article

Subjects

The capacity to use past experience to infer connections between things not yet directly experienced — inferential reasoning — relies on the brain’s ability to detect regularities in complex environments and use them to generate abstract representations of environmental features. However, it is unclear how abstract representations are learned, where they are encoded and how important they are for adaptive human behaviour. Now, Courellis et al. reveal that the population activity of human hippocampal neurons encodes abstract representations of task variables that support subsequent inferential reasoning.

The authors recorded population activity from different brain regions of individuals as they performed an inferential reasoning task in which they learned, via trial and error, stimulus–response–outcome associations (four images; push left or right; low or high monetary reward). Participants learned two related stimulus–response–outcome mappings (contexts), which they did not know were orthogonalized (that is, once they knew all stimulus–response mappings in one context then, by inverting them, they could also know all stimulus–response mappings in the other context). During the task, the two learned contexts could randomly switch every so often without participants receiving an overt signal about this change. Thus, after a context switch, participants needed to infer from the trial feedback error that the context had changed and then update the stimulus–response–outcome mapping they used during the subsequent trial. The authors used the response accuracy on that subsequent trial to determine the presence or absence of such inferential reasoning in their analysis of the neural population activity.

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution

Access options

Buy this article

  • Purchase on SpringerLink
  • Instant access to full article PDF
Buy now

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

References

Original article

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Nature Reviews Neuroscience http://www.nature.com/nrn/

    Jake Rogers

Authors
  1. Jake Rogers
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jake Rogers.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Rogers, J. Disentangling human inference. Nat. Rev. Neurosci. 25, 645 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-024-00860-8

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-024-00860-8

Search

Advanced search

Quick links

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing