4/29/2010 PERMALINK
New research reveals the neural mechanisms that allow you to discover abstract cognitive relationships. There is some evidence that the frontal cortex might be organized in a front to back (known as "rostro-caudal") hierarchy in which neurons located in the anterior region of the frontal cortex process progressively more abstract representations, says coauthor Dr. Andrew Kayser from the Department of Neurology at the University of California, San Francisco. To test this hypothesis, the researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study participants during two learning tasks, one concrete and one that provided study participants with an opportunity to acquire an abstract rule. "We found that more anterior regions along the rostro-caudal axis of the frontal cortex supported rule learning at higher levels of abstraction," says Dr. David Badre from the Department of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences at Brown University.