Behavioral and neural correlates of logical inferences
- Autores: Ana María Martín Salguero
- Directores de la Tesis: Luca Lorenzo Bonatti (dir. tes.)
- Lectura: En la Universitat Pompeu Fabra ( España ) en 2021
- Idioma: español
- Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Ghislaine Dehaene-Lambertz (presid.), Jean-Rémy Hochmann (secret.), Lisa Feigenson (voc.)
- Programa de doctorado: Programa de Doctorado en Tecnologías de la Información y las Comunicaciones por la Universidad Pompeu Fabra
- Materias:
- Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
- Resumen
In the General Introduction, I outline the theoretical ground that sustains our work. I reconstruct the way logicians tried to characterize the process of reasoning by proposing different structures. From this work, several proposals arose to describe the nature of mental representations underlying reasoning. I then review the brain imaging literature on reasoning models in adults, and the neuroimaging evidence in infants about higher cognitive processes that might be involved during reasoning. I do this to justify why a multi-method approach is needed to advance our knowledge in the field.
Chapters 2, 3 and 4 of the dissertation contain original empirical work. In Chapter 2 I explore whether logical abilities are at the core of human thinking and how stable they are across development. I present a series of experiments based on a non-verbal paradigm that may require logical inferences to make sense of a visually presented situation. I study oculomotor responses in pre-verbal infants and adults, showing the first existing evidence for logical processing in infants. This work has been published in Science, in an article of which I am a co-author and a corresponding author. Chapter 3 aims at further exploring the online process of deductive reasoning, this time focusing on the description of the neural profile associated to non-verbal reasoning. I present two experiments in adults. One contains an oculomotor analysis of nonverbal deduction and the second corresponds to the study of hemodynamic brain responses in participants looking at the same scenes. I describe the neural network associated with deduction, and I was able to tell apart different phases of the deductive process, identifying neural and behavioral markers specific to these phases. I show that the brain network active during deduction cannot be assimilated to that involved in natural language processing nor simple imagination. At the same time, I show a remarkable convergence between the neuroimaging of verbal deduction and the circuitry involved in nonverbal deduction, arguing for the presence of an abstract level of representation, neither linguistic nor imaginistic, on which reasoning occurs. This conclusion naturally leads me to develop the research contained in Chapter 4. There, I investigate oculomotor patterns and neural correlates of potentially logical processes in pre-verbal infants. Even in this research, I describe two experiments, one containing oculomotor data and one containing fNIRS data with 12-month-old infants. Again, I find behavioral markers of inferential processes in preverbal infants which are very consistent with adult responses, and this by applying a design which has considerable methodological differences with respect to the Experiments realized in Chapter 1. fNIRS data of the network involved in nonverbal deduction constitute the first analysis of such a high-level cognitive phenomenon in infants. Unlike adults, I find a neural profile more consistently bilateral. I suggest that this result may indicate that logical processing may undergo a neural organization from infancy to adulthood Overall, my experimental work describes coherent results indicating that logical abilities may be at the core of human cognition. She also reported a temporal brain network associated with both logical processes.
In the General Discussion, Chapter 5 is devoted to the discussion of alternative theories that could apply to the non-verbal paradigm used here. I offer some theoretical background to better understand how the predictions of these theories would explain the task I introduced and discuss them based on the oculomotor and neural data collected in Chapters 2-4. In Chapter 6 I summarize the main findings and propose follow up research lines.
