Analysis of the human connectome data supports the notion of a “Common Model of Cognition” for human and human-like intelligence across domains

• Main Authors: Andrea Stocco, Catherine Sibert, Zoe Steine-Hanson, Natalie Koh, John E. Laird, Christian J. Lebiere, Paul Rosenbloom
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier 2021-07-01
• Series: NeuroImage
• Online Access: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811921003128

The Common Model of Cognition (CMC) is a recently proposed, consensus architecture intended to capture decades of progress in cognitive science on modeling human and human-like intelligence. Because of the broad agreement around it and preliminary mappings of its components to specific brain areas, we hypothesized that the CMC could be a candidate model of the large-scale functional architecture of the human brain. To test this hypothesis, we analyzed functional MRI data from 200 participants and seven different tasks that cover a broad range of cognitive domains. The CMC components were identified with functionally homologous brain regions through canonical fMRI analysis, and their communication pathways were translated into predicted patterns of effective connectivity between regions. The resulting dynamic linear model was implemented and fitted using Dynamic Causal Modeling, and compared against six alternative brain architectures that had been previously proposed in the field of neuroscience (three hierarchical architectures and three hub-and-spoke architectures) using a Bayesian approach. The results show that, in all cases, the CMC vastly outperforms all other architectures, both within each domain and across all tasks. These findings suggest that a common set of architectural principles that could be used for artificial intelligence also underpins human brain function across multiple cognitive domains.