Kavli Affiliate: Vincent Ferrera, Daphna Shohamy, Larry Abbott
| Authors: Kenneth Kay, Natalie Biderman, Ramin Khajeh, Manuel Beiran, Christopher J Cueva, Daphna Shohamy, Greg Jensen, Xue-Xin Wei, Vincent P Ferrera and L F Abbott
| Summary:
Relational cognition — the ability to infer relationships that generalize to novel combinations of objects — is fundamental to human and animal intelligence. Despite this importance, it remains unclear how relational cognition is implemented in the brain due in part to a lack of hypotheses and predictions at the levels of collective neural activity and behavior. Here we discovered, analyzed, and experimentally tested neural networks (NNs) that perform transitive inference (TI), a classic relational task (if A > B and B > C, then A > C). We found NNs that (i) generalized perfectly, despite lacking overt transitive structure prior to training, (ii) generalized when the task required working memory (WM), a capacity thought essential to inference in the brain, (iii) emergently expressed behaviors long observed in living subjects, in addition to a novel order-dependent behavior, and (iv) adopted different task solutions yielding alternative behavioral and neural predictions. Further, in a large-scale experiment, we found that human subjects performing WM-based TI showed behavior that matched an unorthodox subset of the NNs. These findings provide neural insights into a classical relational ability, with wider implications for how the brain realizes relational cognition.