Organised by FENS in collaboration with the Lundbeck Foundation, awarder of The Brain Prize, these bi-annual conferences bring together outstanding researchers in key areas of contemporary neuroscience to discuss current concepts and define challenges for future research.

When walking into a new restaurant, we know what to do. We might find a table and wait to be served. We know that the starter will come before the main. When the bill arrives, we know it is the food we are paying for. This is because our brains contain an internal relational model – a representation of the relationships between objects and events that allows old information to be applied flexibly in new situations to generate appropriate behaviour.

This systematic organisation of knowledge has been studied in Psychology since Piaget’s Schemata and Tolman’s cognitive maps, but we are only now beginning to understand how it is represented in the brain.

This Brain Conference will bring together researchers at the cutting edge of this question. They will span representations of objects and their relations, but also schematic representations that structure complex behaviours. Moreover, they will reveal early insights into how such representations can be learnt from memories or, in humans, even built directly from the language. This conference aims to draw attention to this new field of neuroscience that underlies the rich and flexible inferences that characterise real-world behaviour.

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