Title
Social contracts and precautions activate different neurological systems: an fMRI investigation of deontic reasoning.
Abstract
We conducted an event-related, functional MRI investigation of 12 male's and 12 female's reasoning about conditional deontic rules, rules regulating people's behavior. We employed two different types of rules: social contracts and nonsocial, precautionary rules. Although the rules and the demands of the task were matched in terms of their logical structure, reasoning about social contracts and precautions activated a different constellation of neurological structures. The regions differentially activated by social contracts included dorsomedial PFC (BA 6/8), bilateral ventrolateral PFC (BA 47), the left angular gyrus (BA 39), and left orbitofrontal cortex (BA 10). The regions differentially activated by precautions included bilateral insula, the left lentiform nucleus, posterior cingulate (BA 29/31), anterior cingulate (BA 24) and right postcentral gyrus (BA 3). Collectively, reasoning about prescriptive rules activated the dorsomedial PFC (BA 6/8). The results reinforce the view that human reasoning is not a unified phenomenon, but is content-sensitive.
Year
DOI
Venue
2005
10.1016/j.neuroimage.2005.05.033
NeuroImage
Keywords
Field
DocType
Functional MRI,Neurological system,Reasoning,Deontic reasoning,Social cognition,Evolutionary psychology
Insula,Developmental psychology,Right postcentral gyrus,Deontic logic,Cognitive psychology,Psychology,Left lentiform nucleus,Orbitofrontal cortex,Social cognition,Left angular gyrus,Posterior cingulate
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
28
4
1053-8119
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
6
1.18
3
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Laurence Fiddick161.18
Maria Vittoria Spampinato261.18
Jordan Grafman37313.61