Center for BrainHealth, School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, The University of Texas at Dallas, Dallas, TX, 75235-7205, USA.
Sci Rep. 2012;2:411. doi: 10.1038/srep00411. Epub 2012 May 18.
Reasoning processes have been closely associated with prefrontal cortex (PFC), but specifically emerge from interactions among networks of brain regions. Yet it remains a challenge to integrate these brain-wide interactions in identifying the flow of processing emerging from sensory brain regions to abstract processing regions, particularly within PFC. Functional magnetic resonance imaging data were collected while participants performed a visuo-spatial reasoning task. We found increasing involvement of occipital and parietal regions together with caudal-rostral recruitment of PFC as stimulus dimensions increased. Brain-wide connectivity analysis revealed that interactions between primary visual and parietal regions predominantly influenced activity in frontal lobes. Caudal-to-rostral influences were found within left-PFC. Right-PFC showed evidence of rostral-to-caudal connectivity in addition to relatively independent influences from occipito-parietal cortices. In the context of hierarchical views of PFC organization, our results suggest that a caudal-to-rostral flow of processing may emerge within PFC in reasoning tasks with minimal top-down deductive requirements.
推理过程与前额叶皮层（PFC）密切相关，但具体来说，它是从大脑区域网络之间的相互作用中产生的。然而，要整合这些全脑相互作用，以确定从感觉大脑区域到抽象处理区域的处理流，特别是在 PFC 中，仍然是一个挑战。在参与者执行视空间推理任务时，收集了功能磁共振成像数据。我们发现，随着刺激维度的增加，枕叶和顶叶区域的参与度增加，同时 PFC 的头尾部募集也增加。全脑连接分析显示，初级视觉和顶叶区域之间的相互作用主要影响额叶的活动。在左侧 PFC 中发现了从尾部到头部的影响。右侧 PFC 除了来自枕叶和顶叶皮质的相对独立影响外，还显示出从头部到尾部的连接的证据。在 PFC 组织的分层观点的背景下，我们的结果表明，在推理任务中，即使没有最小的自上而下的演绎要求，也可能在 PFC 中出现从尾部到头部的处理流。
