An investigation of the network of brain based and cognitive mechanisms involved in analogy, creativity, and categorization

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Research on thinking and reasoning has made tremendous progress over the last decade with much research on the neural, computational, and underlying cognitive mechanisms involved in analogical, causal, categorical and creative thinking. Using fMRI, researchers have discovered a number of key sites involved in analogical, causal, and creative thinking. Unfortunately it is still difficult to determine the order in which different regions are activated and to use tasks in which participants move or speak. An alternative to fMRI is functional Near Infra-Red Spectroscopy (fNIRS) in which arrays of light emitting diodes are placed on the head that monitor the amount of oxygenated and deoxygenated blood. fNIRS provides much faster temporal resolution than fMRI yet records the same type of information. Furthermore spatial resolution of fNIRS is particularly sensitive in regions involved in higher level cognition Thus NIRS is ideal for propose to do is determine the order of activation of these sites that will allow us to formulate a process model of analogical thinking. In addition, categorical thinking plays an important role in the model and we will also conduct experiments on the time course of categorical thinking, particularly the interaction of the temporal cortex and the DLPFC. This will allow us to distinguish between different models of reasoning and provide a more complete account of analogical and creative thought that was not possible using other methods The results of this work will make it possible to benefit reasoning in science, literature, ands discourse.