Frontal and parietal lobe activation during transitive inference in humans

Abstract

Cortical areas engaged in knowledge manipulation during reasoning were identified with functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) while participants performed transitive inference (TI) on an ordered list of 11 items (e.g. if A < B and B < C, then A < C). Initially, participants learned a list of arbitrarily ordered visual shapes. Learning occurred by exposure to pairs of list items that were adjacent in the sequence. Subsequently, functional MR images were acquired as participants performed TI on non-adjacent sequence items. Control tasks consisted of height comparisons (HT) and passive viewing (VIS). Comparison of the TI task with the HT task identified activation resulting from TI, termed 'reasoning', while controlling for rule application, decision processes, perception, and movement, collectively termed 'support processes'. The HT-VIS comparison revealed activation related to support processes. The TI reasoning network included bilateral prefrontal cortex (PFC), pre-supplementary motor area (preSMA), premotor area (PMA), insula, precuneus, and lateral posterior parietal cortex. By contrast, cortical regions activated by support processes included the bilateral supplementary motor area (SMA), primary motor cortex (M1), somatic sensory cortices, and right PMA. These results emphasize the role of a prefrontal-parietal network in manipulating information to form new knowledge based on familiar facts. The findings also demonstrate PFC activation beyond short-term memory to include mental operations associated with reasoning.