How Do People Detect Generalizable versus New Information?

Sam Hall-McMaster, Lennart Wittkuhn, Luianta Verra, Noa Hedrich, Kazuki Irie et al.

(see article e1492252025)

Generalizing information from past experiences can inform people on how to approach new situations. This ability relies on determining what aspects of a situation are similar to or different from past experiences. Because previous work has implicated the entorhinal cortex as being involved in this process, Hall-McMaster et al. used fMRI to explore how this brain region supports the way people approach situations with both new and previously experienced aspects. During early exposure to new environments, the entorhinal cortex distinguished between similar and new aspects of environments and led to higher accuracy for generalizing similar information. According to the authors, their study suggests that the entorhinal cortex plays a key role in signaling dimensions of past experiences during exposure to new environments to support generalization processes.

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Example representational dissimilarity matrices that capture differences in accuracy based on the current and previous trial, respectively, for an individual participant. This measure is the difference in proportion of fully correct sequence entries between two conditions. See Hall-McMaster et al. for more information.