Programm

Humans have a remarkable ability to extract and learn abstract patterns from experience and organise them into mental models that guide behavior. This symposium brings together current research from studies using behavioural, fMRI and intracranial recordings alongside computational models to investigate the mechanisms driving the formation of abstract knowledge structures and asks how these structures might facilitate the learning of new episodes and action representations.

This symposium will start with a talk by Lukas Kunz, who will showcase how representations of objects and places interact during hippocampal ripples to support the formation of associative memory in humans. In a second talk, Irina Barnaveli will then demonstrate how the hippocampal cognitive maps can guide new motor interactions with the world by linking perception to action. The third talk by Andrea Greve then moves the focus to the question how knowledge structures or schema can guide the formation of new episodic memories. The talk will discuss how violations of expectations influence episodic memory, but also how expected events can improve episodic memory. Building on this, Salma Elnagar will address the question how spatial schemas support new episodic learning under varying degrees of uncertainty. This talk will discuss the conditions under which schema can either aid or hinder learning. Finally, Mirko Thalmann will conclude the symposium by presenting behavioural and computational evidence demonstrating how regularities shared between different chunks of information, i.e., motifs, can be used to retrieve sequences from memory.