Chihuahuas are dogs, right?

摘要

A lumbering Irish wolfhound and a diminutive chihuahua look completely different yet most of us know they are both dogs. Now the hippocampus has been pinpointed as the brain region responsible for forming concepts such as "dog".rnOur brains form concepts by selecting salient characteristics from our experiences, which are then used to make sense of new information. The degree to which we do this is a defining part of human intelligence.rnDharshan Kumaran and colleagues at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, University CollegernLondon, showed volunteers pairs of fractal patterns and told them the patterns represented the night sky. The team had previously created a set of conceptual rules governing whether a pair was designated "sun" or "rain", based on the positions and combinations of the two patterns.