Prefrontal Substrate of Human Relational Reasoning

Abstract

Relational reasoning, including the distinctively human capacity to see analogies between disparate situations, requires the ability to mentally represent and manipulate the relationships among concepts. Over the past decade, studies of cognitive development, aging, and neurological disease have supported the hypothesis that the prefrontal cortex plays a critical role in relational reasoning. Analysis of the component processes of relational reasoning has motivated neuroimaging studies linking these components to distinct neural substrates. Studies using diverse reasoning tasks have converged on the conclusion that frontopolar cortex responds specifically when multiple relations must be integrated to solve a problem. Other subregions in the inferior and middle frontal gyri appear to be critical for resolving interference from distracting elements of the problem and for control of working memory. Mapping the components of relational reasoning is an essential first step toward understanding how the architecture of the prefrontal cortex supports human thinking.