The Area Prostriata may play a role in technical reasoning

Abstract

Most recent research indicated how technical reasoning (TR), namely, a specific form of causal reasoning aimed at understanding the physical world, may support the development of tools and technologies of increasing complexity. We have recently identified the Area PF of the left inferior parietal lobe (PF) as a critical structural correlate of TR, as assessed by using two ad-hoc psycho-technical tests evaluating the two main aspects of TR, i.e., physical world's understanding and visuospatial imagery. Here, we extended our findings by implementing new ad-hoc analyses of our previous data by using a whole-brain approach. Results showed that the cortical thickness (CT) of the left Area Prostriata of the visual cortex, alongside the left Area PF CT, predicts TR performance.

Fig. 1

The left Area Prostriata and Technical Reasoning. A The left Area Prostriata (in light blue), as included in Glasser et al. (2016)’s atlas [16]. B In light blue, the area PF of the left Inferior Parietal Lobe (IPL), as included in Glasser et al. (2016)’s atlas [16]. C Pearson’s correlation between the technical reasoning performance index (TRPI) [5] and the normalised cortical thickness (CT) of the Area Prostriata (R = 0.36). D Pearson’s correlation between TRPI and the CT of the area PF (R = 0.34). E Above is an example of the 24 items we used in Federico et al. (2022) [17] to evaluate the understanding of physical properties (e.g., participants were asked to select which of the four nails were hammered more easily). Below is an example of the 38 items aimed at evaluating participants’ visuospatial skills (e.g., to identify which of the four 3D figures shown on the right corresponds to the bi-dimensional pattern on the left). Both the subtests were extracted from the NV7 battery (https://www.pearsonclinical.fr/nv7). F The normal distribution (density) of Pearson’s correlations between TRPI [17] and the CT of each brain area that is included in Glasser et al. (2016)’s atlas [16]