INB-Lunch-Seminar

Rule guided behavior: representation, inference and choice.

Carlo Reverberi

A major challenge for human cognition is to successfully pursue relevant goals in a continuously changing environment. This implies the ability to select and implement the rules allowing to appropriately deal with the current situation and to derive from them the implicated course of action. For example, people, in front of a traffic light, can easily select and implement a simple rule such as “walk when the traffic signal turns green” and then derive and enact the action “walk” when the green light appears.

Humans however can successfully manage situation more demanding than that. Active rules can be more complex, a common occurrence is the concurrent application of more than one simple rule so that multiple rules need to be combined. The consequences of the active rules might require more sophisticated inferences to be derived; and the environment could only loosely cue the appropriate rule set.

We run a series of functional magnetic imaging experiments to identify which brain structures are involved in critical cognitive operations during rule guided behavior. By applying multivariate analysis techniques, we showed that inferior lateral prefrontal cortex, namely Brodmann Area 47, is involved in the representation of the active rule set, and in the derivation of the consequences of the current active rules. By contrast medial prefrontal cortex was involved in choosing which set of rules to activate next.