Geake John G, Hansen Peter C
Westminster Institute of Education, Oxford Brookes University, Harcourt Hill, UK.
Neuroimage. 2005 Jun;26(2):555-64. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2005.01.035. Epub 2005 Mar 4.
It has been conjectured that the cognitive basis of intelligence is the ability to make fluid or creative analogical relationships between distantly related concepts or pieces of information (Hofstadter, D.R. 1995. Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies. Basic Books, New York., Hofstadter, D.R. 2001. Analogy as the Core of Cognition. In The Analogical Mind: Perspectives from Cognitive Science (D. Gentner, K. J. Holyoak and B. N. Kokinov, Ed.). pp. 504-537. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.). We hypothesised that fluid analogy-making tasks would activate specific regions of frontal cortex that were common to those of previous inferential reasoning tasks. We report here a novel self-paced event-related fMRI study employed to investigate the neural correlates of intelligence associated with undertaking fluid letter string analogy tasks. Stimuli were adapted from items of the AI program Copycat (Mitchell, M. 1993. Analogy-making as Perception: A computer model. The MIT Press, Cambridge MA.). Twelve right-handed adults chose their own "best" completions from four plausible response choices to 55 fluid letter string analogies across a range of analogical depths. An analysis using covariates determined per subject by analogical depth revealed significant bilateral neural activations in the superior, inferior, and middle frontal gyri and in the anterior cingulate/paracingulate cortex. These frontal areas have been previously associated with reasoning tasks involving inductive syllogisms, syntactic hierarchies, and linguistic creativity. A higher-order analysis covarying participants' verbal intelligence measures found correlations with individual BOLD activation strengths in two ROIs within BA 9 and BA 45/46. This is a provocative result given that verbal intelligence is conceptualised as being a measure of crystallised intelligence, while analogy making is conceptualised as requiring fluid intelligence. The results therefore support the conjecture that fluid analogising could underpin general intellectual performance.
有人推测，智力的认知基础是在远亲概念或信息片段之间建立灵活或创造性类比关系的能力（霍夫施塔特，D.R. 1995年。《流动的概念与创造性类比》。基础图书公司，纽约。霍夫施塔特，D.R. 2001年。类比作为认知的核心。载于《类比思维：认知科学的视角》（D. 根特纳、K.J. 霍利约克和B.N. 科基诺夫编）。第504 - 537页。麻省理工学院出版社，马萨诸塞州剑桥）。我们假设，灵活类比任务会激活前额叶皮层的特定区域，这些区域与之前的推理任务所激活的区域相同。我们在此报告一项新颖的自定步速的事件相关功能磁共振成像研究，该研究用于调查与进行灵活字母串类比任务相关的智力的神经关联。刺激材料改编自人工智能程序Copycat的项目（米切尔，M. 1993年。《类比即感知：一个计算机模型》。麻省理工学院出版社，马萨诸塞州剑桥）。12名右利手成年人从四个合理的反应选项中为55个不同类比深度的灵活字母串类比选择自己的“最佳”完成项。使用根据类比深度为每个受试者确定的协变量进行的分析显示，在额上回、额中回、额下回以及前扣带回/旁扣带回皮层出现了显著的双侧神经激活。这些额叶区域之前与涉及归纳三段论、句法层次和语言创造力的推理任务相关。一项对参与者言语智力测量进行协变的高阶分析发现，与BA 9和BA 45/46内两个感兴趣区域的个体血氧水平依赖激活强度存在相关性。鉴于言语智力被概念化为晶体智力的一种测量方式，而类比推理被概念化为需要流体智力，这是一个引人深思的结果。因此，这些结果支持了这样一种推测，即灵活类比可能是一般智力表现的基础。
