Nevertheless, we are able to makes sense of and respond appropriately to such circumstances, drawn from a nearly infinite array of possible combinations, despite having had experience with only a limited number of them. A person may appear in a new context or carry out an action we have never before witnessed them perform, or a word may be used in a novel way within a sentence. Almost always, the individual constituents of these situations (e.g., the people, places, and/or actions involved) are things with which we have had prior experience, and it is the particular combination that is new.
In our everyday lives, we are constantly confronted with the need to make sense of and respond appropriately to new situations. One of the most impressive aspects of human cognition is also one of its most enduring mysteries: how it can respond in appropriate ways to novel circumstances. We argue that this provides a biologically plausible mechanism that approximates a key component of symbol processing, exhibiting both the flexibility, but also some of the limitations, that are associated with this ability in humans. We show how indirection enables the system to flexibly generalize its behavior substantially beyond its direct experience (i.e., systematicity). Here, we provide an example of how the structure and functioning of the prefrontal cortex/basal ganglia working memory system can support variable binding, through a form of indirection (akin to a pointer in computer science). Whereas symbol processing is a fundamental feature of all computer systems, it remains a mystery whether and how this ability is carried out by the brain. It has frequently been argued that this ability relies on symbol processing, which depends critically on the ability to represent variables and bind them to arbitrary values.
In our everyday lives we are often faced with arbitrary instructions that we must understand and follow, and we are able to do so with remarkable ease. The ability to flexibly, rapidly, and accurately perform novel tasks is a hallmark of human behavior.
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