InstrAct · From instructions to actions: characterizing the spatiotemporal neural signatures of instructions following.

From instructions to actions: characterizing the spatiotemporal neural signatures of instructions following.

From air traffic control to large surgery teams, some of the most advanced human collaborative achievements largely rely on our ability to successfully give and follow instructions. Given the combination of novelty, speed, complexity and efficiency, significant effort has been devoted to characterize the mechanisms underlying this ability. However, how the human brain rapidly (i.e. in a matter of seconds) transforms the content of instructions into actions is still poorly understood. This project aims at providing a fundamental description of this transformation by combining recently developed behavioral paradigms and cutting edge methodological and analytical tools. This combination is expected to result in a significant step forward in the understanding of instructions following, compared to the state-of-the-art. This project is especially timely given its relevance to ongoing debates in cognitive neuroscience regarding the structure of cognitive control and working memory systems. InstrAct will also be highly relevant to other disciplines such as robotics and artificial intelligence, which could benefit from the outcomes of this project to implement human-like, complex collaborative artificial systems, a crucial milestone in these fields. These are the objectives of InstrAct: 1. To ascertain the degree of declarative and procedural representational formatting in key brain regions during instruction implementation 2. To characterize the temporal profile of proceduralization 3. To resolve task proceduralization in time and space by combining EEG and fMRI data Conclusions: The overall goal of this proposal was to provide a fundamental understanding about how humans rapidly implement novel instructions. We have completed WP1, which main goal was to apply a recently developed multivariate tracking method to assess the reinstatement of specific representations during a novel instructions task. In particular, we aimed at ascertaining the activate state of declarative and procedural representations in key brain regions. This study revealed a co-activation of both types of representations, but a unique role of procedural representations in supporting efficient behavior. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the early termination of the grant, WP2 and WP3 were not completed.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз