ArticleCurrent biology : CB2026
An abstract relational map emerges in the human medial prefrontal cortex with consolidation.
Article in Current biology : CB, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- Compressive learning scaffolds higher-order network structure to enhance human knowledge acquisition.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Hippocampo-neocortical interaction as compressive retrieval-augmented generation.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Memory reactivation during sleep promotes structure abstraction.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Entorhinal Cortex Signals Dimensions of Past Experience That Can Be Generalized in a Novel Environment.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Article
- Cognitive Maps in the Prefrontal Cortex.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Review
- Abstract rule generalization for composing novel meaning recruits a frontoparietal control network.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
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Abstract
Understanding the structure of a problem, such as the relationships between stimuli, supports fast learning and flexible reasoning. Rodent work has suggested that the abstraction of structure away from sensory details occurs over the course of multiple days in the cortex. However, direct evidence of such explicit relational representations in humans is scarce, and it is unclear whether they emerge on similar timescales. Here, we combine a graph-learning paradigm with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to look for such a relational map in the human brain. We first trained participants on two associative graphs with the same structure. We then scanned participants twice while they used this knowledge, with several days between scanning sessions. Using fMRI repetition suppression, we found an abstract relational representation in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) that emerged across the two scanning sessions. This finding was also replicated using representational similarity analysis (RSA). These results shed new light on how neural representations organizing relational knowledge change with time.
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Registered trials
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.