Evidence map›Paper›PMID 32826311›Full record

ArticleThe Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience2020

The Hippocampus Maps Concept Space, Not Feature Space.

Stephanie Theves, Guillén Fernández, Christian F Doeller

Abstract read
In one paragraph

Article in The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 39 papers.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
39citing papers in PubMed
–field-weighted citation impact
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

The trial behind it

Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.

Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

39 citing papers in PubMed.

  1. Distinct Hippocampal Mechanisms Support Concept Formation and Updating.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026
    Article
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  7. Thinking as Analogy-Making: Toward a Neural Process Account of General Intelligence.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025
    Review
  8. Article
  9. Review
  10. Tell me why: the missing w in episodic memory's what, where, and when.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2025
    Review
  11. The Scope and Limits of Fine-Grained Image and Category Information in the Ventral Visual Pathway.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025
    Article
  12. Article
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  14. Spontaneous eye movements reflect the representational geometries of conceptual spaces.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024
    Article
  15. Article
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  17. Hippocampal sequences span experience relative to rewards.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024
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  18. Article
  19. The construction and use of cognitive maps in model-based control.Journal of experimental psychology. General · 2024
    Article
  20. Article
4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

3 authors.

Stephanie ThevesMax-Planck-Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, 04103 Leipzig, Germany theves@cbs.mpg.de doeller@cbs.mpg.de.ORCID 0000-0003-3414-5534
Guillén FernándezDonders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour, Radboud University and Radboud University Medical Center, 6525 EN Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Christian F DoellerMax-Planck-Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, 04103 Leipzig, Germany theves@cbs.mpg.de doeller@cbs.mpg.de.

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

The hippocampal formation encodes maps of space and a key question in neuroscience is whether its spatial coding principles also provide a universal metric for the organization of nonspatial, conceptual information. Previous work demonstrated directional coding during navigation through a continuous stimulus feature space as well as mapping of distances in a feature space that was relevant for concept learning. Here we provide the first unambiguous evidence for a hippocampal representation of the actual concept space, by showing that the hippocampal distance signal selectively reflects the mapping of specifically conceptually relevant rather than of all feature dimensions. During fMRI scanning of 32 human participants (21 females), we presented everyday objects, which had beforehand been associated with specific values on three continuous feature dimensions. Crucially, only two dimensions were relevant to prior concept learning. We find that hippocampal responses to the objects reflect their relative distances in a space defined along conceptually relevant dimensions compared with distances in a space defined along all feature dimensions. These findings suggest that the hippocampus supports knowledge acquisition by dynamically encoding information in a space spanned along dimensions that are relevant in relation to define concepts.

Indexed as

Concept FormationSpatial BehaviorAdultFemaleHippocampusHumansMagnetic Resonance ImagingMaleSpatial Memoryconceptual knowledgefMRIhippocampuslearningspatial coding

Identifiers

PMID32826311
PMCPMC7534914

What OpenQuestion holds

Textmetadata
Read underepoch 390

Registered trials

None linked

Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.