Mapping the Neural Taxonomy of Mental Objects in Moment-to-Moment Cognition.

We mentally represent all kinds of objects across a variety of tasks and source modalities (i.e., mental objects). Recent work has proposed that mental objects are represented by content-free, reassignable pointers (or indexicals, tokens) in our moment-to-moment processing. Are all mental objects represented by the same set of pointers? If not, where should we draw the lines between different kinds of pointers? In this Perspective, we propose a novel research program aiming at unraveling the neural taxonomy of mental objects by testing how the neural markers for pointers generalize across different paradigms, task goals, source modalities, and more.