A LUMBERING Irish wolfhound and a diminutive chihuahua look completely different yet most of us know they are both dogs. Now the hippocampus has been pinpointed as the brain region responsible for forming concepts such as 鈥渄og鈥�.
Our brains form concepts by selecting salient characteristics from our experiences, which are then used to make sense of new information. The degree to which we do this is a defining part of human intelligence.
Dharshan Kumaran and colleagues at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, University College London, showed volunteers pairs of fractal patterns and told them the patterns represented the night sky. The team had previously created a set of conceptual rules governing whether a pair was designated 鈥渟un鈥� or 鈥渞ain鈥�, based on the positions and combinations of the two patterns.
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After being asked to predict the weather from the patterns and being rewarded when they got it right, some participants deduced the conceptual rules. The team could correctly predict who this was from activity in the hippocampus, recorded by brain scans (Neuron, vol 63, p 889).