WIP & Open Science Session

Neural representations in a naturalistic compositional planning task

Presented by Qingxi Ma

Abstract: The ability to plan – using our understanding of the world to work out a series of actions that lead to the attainment of some goal – is ubiquitously manifested in our daily lives and lies at the core of human intelligence. While studies have established the involvement of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) in planning, the neural representation of plans within the PFC remains largely unclear. Recent studies of sequence working memory and schema-like action inference tasks have discovered a novel representation where the sequences of actions are simultaneously represented in the PFC population activity. Here, we set out to test whether similar representations extend to internally generated action plans during planning. Specifically, we focus on planning problems involving compositional computation, whereby plans are generated through combining reusable building blocks (or ‘primitives’) in different ways. To this end, we adapt the 'silhouette task' from Schwartenbeck et al. (2023), where subjects have to build target silhouettes using a set of building blocks. We have specific representational hypotheses for the brain activity during planning and aim to test them with 7T fMRI.

 Open Science Session 

Please join us on 25 March 2026 at the OxCIN United Open Science Award session which will involve presentations from the winners and an award ceremony.

The Early Career Researcher Category Award goes to Gaurav Bhalerao for enhancing the impact of brain imaging data through open research practices, while also advancing a culture of open research within their department and across the wider University.

The Student Category Award is presented to Levi Kumle for consistently demonstrating an outstanding commitment to open research practices through tool development, empirical research, training, advocacy, and citizenship.

We would also like to recognise the recipients of commendations, whose contributions reflect an exceptional commitment to openness, collaboration, and research integrity across our community.

Visit our webpage to learn more about the awards and the awardees’ incredible work.

We look forward to celebrating with you!