Three aspects of representation in neuroscience.

Neuroscientists often describe neural activity as a representation of something, or claim to have found evidence for a neural representation, but there is considerable ambiguity about what such claims entail. Here we develop a thorough account of what 'representation' does and should do for neuroscientists in terms of three key aspects of representation. (i) Correlation: a neural representation correlates to its represented content; (ii) causal role: the representation has a characteristic effect on behavior; and (iii) teleology: a goal or purpose served by the behavior and thus the representation. We draw broadly on literature in both neuroscience and philosophy to show how these three aspects are rooted in common approaches to understanding the brain and mind. We first describe different contexts that 'representation' has been closely linked to in neuroscience, then discuss each of the three aspects in detail.

• Publication year

  2022

• Venue

  Trends in Cognitive Sciences

• Publication date

  2022-09-01

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Philosophy

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1016/j.tics.2022.08.014PMID 36175303PMCID PMC11749295
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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