Study reveals that the brain creates “maps” to organize information about everyday objects
The research, led by the University of Coimbra, shows that the human brain organizes information in continuous topographic maps, allowing for easy “readouts” from one brain region to another, thereby promoting cognitive efficiency.
The brain is one of the most mysterious organs in the human body, and many questions remain about its functions and inner workings – particularly those related to how it organizes information central to our daily lives. This week, a new study led by the University of Coimbra (UC) offers new insights into how the brain organizes information about objects we use every day. Researchers found that the human brain organizes information in continuous topographic maps, allowing for easy “readouts” from one brain region to another and, in turn, promoting cognitive efficiency.
This new study – conducted under the UC-led European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant ContentMap, and published in the journal NeuroImage – introduces the concept of “contentopic maps”: brain maps that show how different categories of information are spatially organized in the brain.
“These maps reveal how the brain encodes information – for example, how we grasp and manipulate tools – and how it organizes knowledge about objects into continuous, map-like patterns across the cortex,” explains Jorge Almeida, the study’s lead author and principal investigator.
The neuroscientist goes on to explain that “object-related information is not randomly distributed; rather, it is organized in structured maps – the so-called contentopic maps – whereby neighboring regions of the cortex represent objects with similar properties. As we move along the surface of the brain, we can observe a smooth, continuous transition in how different aspects of these object properties are represented,” adds Almeida, Researcher and Professor at the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences of the UC (FPCEUC) and Director of the Proaction Lab.
This discovery stems from a simple yet fundamental question: How does the brain know that a mug is for drinking, a hammer is for hitting, or a key fits into a lock? Although it may seem straightforward, the brain must process multiple types of information – such as an object’s shape, material, and function – to make sense of it.
To uncover this process, the research team used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a technique that allows for precise brain imaging. The goal, Almeida explains, was to “understand how participants in the study processed sequences of visually-presented manipulable objects, ordered along dimensions defined in our previous research.” The team then used advanced data modeling techniques to detect how brain activity changed systematically along different levels of these object-related dimensions.
The findings show that “the contentopic maps are continuous, and are consistent across participants, meaning that one individual’s maps can be predicted from another’s”, says Almeida. These maps “are independent for each dimension, meaning there are distinct maps for different object properties, and they are also independent of low-level sensory features, because purely sensory maps cannot fully account for the representations in these maps”.
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This shows that “the brain prefers to organize information in ways that enhance neural efficiency,” says Almeida. “Just as geographic maps efficiently convey complex information about our surroundings, these topographic brain maps provide fast and effective readouts of the information being processed in each brain region.”.
He further highlights the importance of these maps for cognitive flexibility, as “they allow the brain to distinguish between objects while generalizing across similar ones — a hallmark of human intelligence.”
For the neuroscientist, who has been studying the brain for nearly two decades, “these results shed new light on how the brain’s internal architecture transforms our experience into knowledge, revealing that the same mapping principles that shape how we see the world may also underlie how we understand it.”
Almeida also underscores the importance of fundamental science for advancing knowledge: “Without basic research, there can be no applied science; we must first understand how the brain works before we can develop any therapeutic approaches.”
The study also involved collaboration with researchers from the University of Glasgow and other scientists from the University of Coimbra. The full scientific article, “Contentopic mapping in ventral and dorsal association cortex: the topographical organization of manipulable object information”, is available at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2025.121514.