ArticleNature human behaviour2025
Two-dimensional neural geometry underpins hierarchical organization of sequence in human working memory.
Article in Nature human behaviour, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed.
- Compressive learning scaffolds higher-order network structure to enhance human knowledge acquisition.Nature communications · 2026Article
- The Temporal Dynamics of the Labeling Algorithm During Natural Language Comprehension: Neural Evidence for Phrase Grammatical Type Generation.Neurobiology of language (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2026Article
- Building hierarchically nested structure by rapid neural sequences.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- How the brain memorizes the world from others' perspectives: investigating allocentric encoding of object features during perspective taking.BMC psychology · 2025Article
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5 authors.
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Abstract
Working memory (WM) is constructive in nature. Instead of passively retaining information, WM reorganizes complex sequences into hierarchically embedded chunks to overcome capacity limits and facilitate flexible behaviour. Here, to investigate the neural mechanisms underlying hierarchical reorganization in WM, we performed two electroencephalography and one magnetoencephalography experiments, wherein humans retain in WM a temporal sequence of items, that is, syllables, which are organized into chunks, that is, multisyllabic words. We demonstrate that the one-dimensional sequence is represented by two-dimensional neural representational geometry in WM arising from left prefrontal and temporoparietal regions, with separate dimensions encoding item position within a chunk and chunk position in the sequence. Critically, this two-dimensional geometry is observed consistently in different experimental settings, even during tasks not encouraging hierarchical reorganization in WM and correlates with WM behaviour. Overall, these findings strongly support that complex sequences are reorganized into factorized multidimensional neural representational geometry in WM, which also speaks to general structure-based organizational principles given WM's involvement in many cognitive functions.
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