Task structure tailors the geometry of neural representations in human lateral prefrontal cortex.

How do human brains represent tasks of varying structure? The lateral prefrontal cortex (lPFC) flexibly represents task information. However, principles that shape lPFC representational geometry remain unsettled. We use fMRI and pattern analyses to reveal the structure of lPFC representational geometries as humans perform two distinct categorization tasks one with flat, conjunctive categories and another with hierarchical, context-dependent categories.

Lowered inter-stimulus discriminability hurts incremental contributions to learning.

How does the similarity between stimuli affect our ability to learn appropriate response associations for them? In typical laboratory experiments learning is investigated under somewhat ideal circumstances, where stimuli are easily discriminable. This is not representative of most real-life learning, where overlapping "stimuli" can result in different "rewards" and may be learned simultaneously (e.g.

The dimensionality of neural representations for control.

Cognitive control allows us to think and behave flexibly based on our context and goals. At the heart of theories of cognitive control is a control representation that enables the same input to produce different outputs contingent on contextual factors. In this review, we focus on an important property of the control representation's neural code: its representational dimensionality.

Insights into visual working memory precision at the feature- and object-level from a hemispheric encoding manipulation.

Mnemonic precision is an important aspect of visual working memory (WM). Here, we probed mechanisms that affect precision for spatial (size) and non-spatial (colour) features of an object, and whether these features are encoded and/or stored separately in WM. We probed precision at the -that is, whether different features of a single object are represented separately or together in WM-and the -that is, whether different features across a set of sequentially presented objects are represented in the same or different WM stores.