Journal
JOURNAL OF NEUROSCIENCE
Volume 36, Issue 4, Pages 1223-1236Publisher
SOC NEUROSCIENCE
DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1473-15.2016
Keywords
monkey; prefrontal cortex; single-unit activity; transitive inference
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Funding
- CE FP7 Grant BRAINLEAP [GA 306502]
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When informed that A > B and B > C, humans and other animals can easily conclude that A > C. This remarkable trait of advanced animals, which allows them to manipulate knowledge flexibly to infer logical relations, has only recently garnered interest in mainstream neuroscience. How the brain controls these logical processes remains an unanswered question that has been merely superficially addressed in neuroimaging and lesion studies, which are unable to identify the underlying neuronal computations. We observed that the activation pattern of neurons in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) during pair comparisons in a highly demanding transitive inference task fully supports the behavioral performance of the two monkeys that we tested. Our results indicate that the PFC contributes to the construction and use of a mental schema to represent premises. This evidence provides a novel framework for understanding the function of various areas of brain in logic processes and impairments to them in degenerative, traumatic, and psychiatric pathologies.
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