The Neural Basis of Conditional Reasoning with Arbitrary Content

Logic, language and the brain

“…A recent series of results (Monti et al, 2007(Monti et al, , 2009Rodriguez-Moreno and Hirsch, 2009) nonetheless suggests that language areas are not involved in the deductive process, a finding consistent with several previous reports (Canessa et al, 2005;Fangmeier et al, 2006;Goel and Dolan, 2001;Knauff et al, 2002;Noveck et al, 2004;Parsons and Osherson, 2001;Prado and Noveck, 2007). We interpret these findings as implying that the role of language is confined to initial encoding of verbal statements into mental representations suitable for the inferential calculus.…”

“…This expectation is reinforced by the fact that our simple and complex inferences were matched for linguistic complexity (compare the statements comprising the simple and complex arguments in Table 1). Therefore, should any language-related activation be apparent, it can not be considered to reflect differences in initial reading or comprehension (for a discussion on linguistic versus logical complexity, see Noveck et al, 2004). Table 1 about here.…”

“…. ", "and", "not", Monti et al, 2007;Noveck et al, 2004), recruit different mechanisms than those serving categorical syllogisms (based on quantifiers such as "all", "none", "some", Goel et al, 1998Goel et al, , 2000Rodriguez-Moreno and Hirsch, 2009). Yet other mechanisms may be involved in relational syllogisms (involving relational terms like ".…”

“…Different studies have focussed on deontic and social reasoning (Canessa et al, 2005;Fiddick et al, 2005), propositional arguments (Monti et al, 2007;Reverberi et al, 2007) along with categorical (Osherson et al, 1998;Parsons and Osherson, 2001;Rodriguez-Moreno and Hirsch, 2009) and relational syllogisms (Knauff et al, 2002(Knauff et al, , 2003Fangmeier et al, 2006). Other work has investigated the impact of familiar and unfamiliar information (Goel et al, 2000;Goel and Dolan, 2001;Noveck et al, 2004), prior beliefs (Goel and Dolan, 2003a), and emotional content (Goel and Dolan, 2003b) on the neural implementation of deductive inference. Further investigations have addressed the role in deduction of visual imagery (Knauff et al, 2002(Knauff et al, , 2003, spatial representation of propositions (Prado et al, 2010b), and alternative modalities of stimulus presentation (Fangmeier and Knauff, 2009;RodriguezMoreno and Hirsch, 2009).…”

Regions of the MPFC differentially tuned to social and nonsocial affective evaluation

“…At present, there is no neuroimaging work on the neural basis of negation. But existing work that contrasts modus tollens (if p then q, given not p, then not q) with modus ponens (if p then q, given p then q) does find arMPFC activation (Noveck, Goel, & Smith, 2004).…”