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Abstract:
Analogical reasoning involves several abilities including
noticing relations among elements, mapping corresponding elements,
and inhibiting inconsistent mappings. The prefrontal cortex may
govern several of these abilities. In order to explore this
hypothesis we tested frontal-variant frontotemporal dementia
patients, brain damaged control patients, and normal controls on a
series of picture analogy problems (Markman & Gentner, 1993;
Tohill & Holyoak, 2000). Participants were shown problems
containing two scenes with three numbered objects. In all problems
an analogy could be formed between the scenes based on the
relations among the objects. Participants were then instructed to
choose which object in the second scene "went with" an object in
the first scene that had both a perceptual match and a relational
match. We hypothesized that the ability to choose the relational
match after forming a relational system mapping in the scenes would
require intact prefrontal cortex. Resul! ! ts showed that normal
and brain damaged control participants chose greater numbers of
relational matches and fewer perceptual matches than frontal
patients. In contrast, frontal patients preferred perceptual
matches over relational matches. These results suggest that the
prefrontal cortex plays a critical role in relational reasoning in
scene analogy problems.
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