The Cognitive Architecture of Recursion: Behavioral and fMRI Evidence from the Visual, Musical and Motor Domains

In this manuscript, we summarize the results of our research program aiming at describing the cognitive architecture underlying the representation of recursive hierarchical embedding. After conducting a series of behavioral and fMRI experiments in the visual, musical and motor domains, we found that, behaviorally, the acquisition of recursive rules seems supported by cognitive resources that are general across domains. However, when we test well-trained participants in the fMRI, their representation of recursion seems supported by activating schemas stored in (visual, musical and motor) domain-specific repositories. This suggests that the resources necessary to acquire recursive rules are different from those necessary to utilize these rules after extensive training.