| Title: |
Brain areas for reversible symbolic reference, a potential singularity of the human brain |
| Authors: |
van Kerkoerle, Timo; Pape, Louise; Ekramnia, Milad; Feng, Xiaoxia; Tasserie, Jordy; Dupont, Morgan; Li, Xiaolian; Jarraya, Béchir; Vanduffel, Wim; Dehaene, Stanislas; Dehaene-Lambertz, Ghislaine |
| Contributors: |
Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale (INSERM); Université Paris-Saclay; Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives (CEA); Radboud University Nijmegen; Beijing Normal University (BNU); Catholic University of Leuven = Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KU Leuven); Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines (UVSQ); Hôpital Foch Suresnes; Massachusetts General Hospital Boston; Harvard University; ANR-23-IAHU-0010,ICE (IAHU),Institut Robert-Debré du Cerveau de l'Enfant(2023); European Project: 695710,ERC-2015-AdG,ERC-2015-AdG,Babylearn(2016) |
| Source: |
EISSN: 2050-084X ; eLife ; https://hal.science/hal-05033764 ; eLife, 2025, 12, ⟨10.7554/elife.87380.3⟩ ; https://elifesciences.org/articles/87380 |
| Publisher Information: |
CCSD; eLife Sciences Publication |
| Publication Year: |
2025 |
| Collection: |
Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines: HAL-UVSQ |
| Subject Terms: |
Human brain; [SDV.NEU]Life Sciences [q-bio]/Neurons and Cognition [q-bio.NC] |
| Description: |
International audience ; The emergence of symbolic thinking has been proposed as a dominant cognitive criterion to distinguish humans from other primates during hominisation. Although the proper definition of a symbol has been the subject of much debate, one of its simplest features is bidirectional attachment: the content is accessible from the symbol, and vice versa. Behavioural observations scattered over the past four decades suggest that this criterion might not be met in non-human primates, as they fail to generalise an association learned in one temporal order (A to B) to the reverse order (B to A). Here, we designed an implicit fMRI test to investigate the neural mechanisms of arbitrary audio–visual and visual–visual pairing in monkeys and humans and probe their spontaneous reversibility. After learning a unidirectional association, humans showed surprise signals when this learned association was violated. Crucially, this effect occurred spontaneously in both learned and reversed directions, within an extended network of high-level brain areas, including, but also going beyond, the language network. In monkeys, by contrast, violations of association effects occurred solely in the learned direction and were largely confined to sensory areas. We propose that a human-specific brain network may have evolved the capacity for reversible symbolic reference. |
| Document Type: |
article in journal/newspaper |
| Language: |
English |
| Relation: |
info:eu-repo/grantAgreement//695710/EU/Neural mechanisms of learning in the infant brain : from Statistics to Rules and Symbols/Babylearn |
| DOI: |
10.7554/elife.87380.3 |
| Availability: |
https://hal.science/hal-05033764; https://hal.science/hal-05033764v1/document; https://hal.science/hal-05033764v1/file/elife-87380-v1.pdf; https://doi.org/10.7554/elife.87380.3 |
| Rights: |
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ ; info:eu-repo/semantics/OpenAccess |
| Accession Number: |
edsbas.39D37C8 |
| Database: |
BASE |