Reasoning by analogy requires the left frontal pole: lesion-deficit mapping and clinical implications

Abstract

SEE BURGESS DOI101093/BRAIN/AWW092 FOR A SCIENTIFIC COMMENTARY ON THIS ARTICLE : Analogical reasoning is at the core of the generalization and abstraction processes that enable concept formation and creativity. The impact of neurological diseases on analogical reasoning is poorly known, despite its importance in everyday life and in society. Neuroimaging studies of healthy subjects and the few studies that have been performed on patients have highlighted the importance of the prefrontal cortex in analogical reasoning. However, the critical cerebral bases for analogical reasoning deficits remain elusive. In the current study, we examined analogical reasoning abilities in 27 patients with focal damage in the frontal lobes and performed voxel-based lesion-behaviour mapping and tractography analyses to investigate the structures critical for analogical reasoning. The findings revealed that damage to the left rostrolateral prefrontal region (or some of its long-range connections) specifically impaired the ability to reason by analogies. A short version of the analogy task predicted the existence of a left rostrolateral prefrontal lesion with good accuracy. Experimental manipulations of the analogy tasks suggested that this region plays a role in relational matching or integration. The current lesion approach demonstrated that the left rostrolateral prefrontal region is a critical node in the analogy network. Our results also suggested that analogy tasks should be translated to clinical practice to refine the neuropsychological assessment of patients with frontal lobe lesions.

Increased cognitive complexity reveals abnormal brain network activity in individuals with corpus callosum dysgenesis

“…The FPN is thought to be responsible for the moment-to-moment implementation of cognitive task goals (Cocchi, Zalesky, Fornito, & Mattingley, 2013;Dosenbach et al, 2007). Damage to frontal and parietal cortices has also been associated with poorer performance in tests of cognitive reasoning (Urbanski et al, 2016;Woolgar et al, 2010). In line with this, our results suggest that in CCD individuals FPN activity does not modulate in the manner required to solve complex cognitive problems.…”

The Prefrontal Cortex and Neurological Impairments of Active Thought

“…Left lateral patients were impaired even with good working memory but this was not the case for the other frontal groups. Recently, Urbanski et al (2016) used analogy tasks which are somewhat simpler than fluid intelligence tests, yet require abstraction. Patients were requested to find an analogy between a source set and one of two candidate sets of coloured letters of varying size.…”

Advanced lesion symptom mapping analyses and implementation asBCBtoolkit

“…Non-local effects of lesions have previously been explored using various forms of atlas-based analyses of tract damage [23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32], lesion-driven tractography [32][33][34], disconnectomemapping [35][36][37][38][39] and lesion-driven resting state fMRI (rs-fMRI) connectivity [34,40].…”

“…The dysfunction of distant areas that are connected to the lesioned tissue has also been reported in fMRI studies. They have shown that the networks are disrupted even by distant lesions through disconnection and diaschisis mechanisms [20][21][22].Non-local effects of lesions have previously been explored using various forms of atlas-based analyses of tract damage [23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32], lesion-driven tractography [32][33][34], disconnectomemapping [35][36][37][38][39] and lesion-driven resting state fMRI (rs-fMRI) connectivity [34,40].However, determining what these methods actually measure and identifying how to properly combine them are not always fully clear to the scientific community. Furthermore, there is an extremely limited availability of free, open-source software that applies methods to measure the non-local effects of lesions.…”