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Poster Session C: Friday, August 15, 2:00 – 5:00 pm, de Brug & E‑Hall

Structural abstraction of emotion knowledge in hippocampal-prefrontal systems

Yumeng Ma¹, Philip A. Kragel¹; ¹Emory University

Presenter: Yumeng Ma

Hippocampal-prefrontal systems organize knowledge in a map-like way across multiple domains, from physical space to abstract concepts. It is well known that knowledge about emotional events is organized in a low-dimensional space, raising the question of whether the brain uses cognitive maps to represent emotion concepts. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging while participants viewed emotionally evocative film clips, we decoded patterns of neural activity in hippocampal-prefrontal systems to predict representations of emotion concepts in a computational model of relational memory inspired by the hippocampal formation. Our findings demonstrate that hippocampal-prefrontal systems contain map-like representations of emotion concepts at multiple levels of granularity. These findings provide new insight into how the brain organizes knowledge about emotional events to react adaptively in a complex environment.

Topic Area: Reward, Value & Social Decision Making

Extended Abstract: Full Text PDF