The neural mechanism of human numerical inductive reasoning process: a combined ERP and fMRI study

  • Authors:

  • Peipeng Liang;Ning Zhong;Shengfu Lu;Jiming Liu;Yiyu Yao;Kuncheng Li;Yanhui Yang

  • Affiliations:

  • The International WIC Institute, Beijing University of Technology, China;The International WIC Institute, Beijing University of Technology, China and Dept. of Life Science and Informatics, Maebashi Institute of Technology, Japan;The International WIC Institute, Beijing University of Technology, China;The International WIC Institute, Beijing University of Technology, China and Dept. of Computer Science, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong;The International WIC Institute, Beijing University of Technology, China and Dept. of Computer Science, University of Regina, Canada;Dept. of Radiology, Xuanwu Hospital, Capital Medical University, China;Dept. of Radiology, Xuanwu Hospital, Capital Medical University, China

  • Venue:
  • WImBI'06 Proceedings of the 1st WICI international conference on Web intelligence meets brain informatics
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

Inductive reasoning is one of the most important higher level cognitive functions of the human brain, and we still know very little about its neural mechanism. In the present study, event-related potential (ERP) and event-related fMRI are used to explore the dynamic spatiotemporal characteristics of inductive reasoning process. We hypothesize that the process of numerical inductive reasoning is partially dissociable over time and space. A typical task of inductive reasoning, function-finding, was adopted. Induction tasks and calculation tasks were performed in the experiments, respectively. ERP results suggest that the time course of inductive reasoning process is partially dissociable as the following three sub-processes: number recognition (the posterior P100 and N200), strategy formation (P300) and hypothesis generation and verification (the positive slow waves). fMRI results show many activations, including prefrontal gyrus (BA 6), inferior parietal lobule (BA 7, 40), and occipital cortex (BA 18). After the respective discussions, the two kinds of data are combined qualitatively, then the dynamic spatiotemporal characteristic of inductive reasoning process are depicted using a conceptual figure. This study is a preliminary effort towards deeply understanding the dynamic information processing mechanism of human inductive reasoning process.