Brain Mechanisms Subserving Perception of Rules/Principles

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Humans can perceive a modal and symbolic informations such as Rules, Principles, Relationships etc., which could not be attributed to specific receptors which detect physical energy. This abilities should be acquired through continuous primates' evolutionary processes. Common patterns of brain information processing mechanisms among primates, including humans, could be assumed, and thus, we attempted to detect such precursors in the monkey brain.During the course of human postnatal period, varieties of higher cognitive functions develop in parallel with linguistic functions, which include, purpose-means relationship of bodily actions, logical problem solving abilities, perception of rational relationships between self actions and their results, perception of relative logical structures of object manipulation acts, and so on. Higher cognitive abilities of inference and prediction related to bodily acts would comprise bases of these functions. We have been successful in recording neurona … More l activities from the cerebral cortex which are related to various tool-using acts in Japanese monkeys, that were previously believed never be able to use tools. During such tool-use learning processes, we were able to train monkeys with task which would represent precursors of above depicted higher cognitive functions, and attempted to uncover neural mechanisms of such an intelligence.The paradigms included, 1) Representation of semantics of hand-mouth coordination acts in the parietal cortex, 2) Neural mechanisms to represent an intention for combined tool-using acts, 3) Acquisition of the precursors of "naming" by perception of semantics, 4) Induction of imitation behavior after training joint attention, 5) Representation of movements of body parts as elements constituting actions as a whole, 6) Understandings of the spatial structure based on bodily awareness, 7) Perception of relationship between self body and external space in the secondary somatosensory area, 8) Parietal representation of structure/segmentation of the motor acts. Less