Schedule of Events | Search Abstracts | Invited Symposia | Symposia | Poster Sessions | Data Blitz

Sketchpad Series 

Analyzing distinct and overlapping neural circuits that process spatial and non-spatial context cues during hierarchical decision-making

Poster Session C - Sunday, March 8, 2026, 5:00 – 7:00 pm PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom

Omar Zeid¹ (), Eric Schumacher¹, Thackery Brown¹; ¹Georgia Institute of Technology

Decision-making based on environmental cues is a fundamental trait of cognition – involving multiple brain regions such as the hippocampus, prefrontal cortex, and basal ganglia. There is evidence that spatial and non-spatial cues are processed differently in the brain. Similarly, cases where the status of one cue will dictate the response to a different cue (“hierarchically related” cues) produce different activation patterns at higher and lower hierarchical levels. Surprisingly, these fields of spatial memory and cognitive control have been largely independent, with the former being conducted largely with non-spatial stimuli and the latter conducted without modeling control states in the brain, despite many neurological conditions having cognitive deficits in both. Thus, we adapted a high-resolution fMRI study from a psychophysical variation of an AX-continuous performance task (AX-CPT) that a former student piloted. Participants observed environmental cues in a virtual space and needed to pick whether the resulting scene was one of a set of “Target” scenarios. The cues that conditionally determine whether a scene is a Target scene are either “Non-Spatial” or include “Spatial” cues (i.e., the direction they are facing in the environment). Thus, we are investigating behavioral and neuroanatomical differences between processing spatial and non-spatial cues within a hierarchical context. So far, our behavioral pilot data align with recent, non-spatial AX-CPT work. Also, our previous work predicts that the neural circuits in the Spatial and Non-Spatial trials will have significant differences (e.g., with hippocampal activation seen during Spatial trials) despite significant overlap in the putamen and prefrontal cortices.

Topic Area: THINKING: Decision making