Most reasoning tasks used in behavioral and neuroimaging studies are abstract, triggering slow, effortful processes. By contrast, most of everyday life reasoning is fast and effortless, as when we exchange arguments in conversation. Recent behavioral studies have shown that reasoning tasks with the same underlying logic can be solved much more easily if they are embedded in an argumentative context. In the present article, we study the neural bases of this type of everyday, argumentative reasoning. Such reasoning is both a social and a metarepresentational process, suggesting it should share some mechanisms, and thus some neural bases, with other social, metarepresentational process such as pragmatics, metacognition, or theory of mind. To isolate the neural bases of argumentative reasoning, we measured fMRI activity of participants who read the same statement presented either as the conclusion of an argument, or as an assertion. We found that conclusions of arguments, compared to assertions, were associated with greater activity in a region of the medial prefrontal cortex that was identified in quantitative meta-analyses of studies on theory of mind. This study shows that it is possible to use more ecologically valid tasks to study the neural bases of reasoning, and that using such tasks might point to different neural bases than those observed with the more abstract and artificial tasks typically used in the neuroscience of reasoning. Specifically, we speculate that reasoning in an argumentative context might rely on mechanisms supporting metarepresentational processes in the medial prefrontal cortex.

中文翻译：

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论证推理的神经基础

行为和神经影像学研究中使用的大多数推理任务都是抽象的，会触发缓慢而费力的过程。相比之下，日常生活中的大多数推理都是快速而轻松的，就像我们在对话中交换论点一样。最近的行为研究表明，如果将具有相同底层逻辑的推理任务嵌入到争论的上下文中，则它们可以更容易地解决。在本文中，我们研究了这种日常辩论推理的神经基础。这种推理既是一个社会过程，又是一个元表征过程，表明它应该与其他社会、元表征过程（如语用学、元认知或心理理论）共享一些机制，从而共享一些神经基础。为了隔离论证推理的神经基础，我们测量了阅读相同陈述的参与者的 fMRI 活动，这些陈述要么是作为论点的结论，要么是作为断言。我们发现，与断言相比，争论的结论与内侧前额叶皮层区域的更大活动相关，该区域在心理理论研究的定量荟萃分析中被确定。这项研究表明，可以使用更具生态学意义的任务来研究推理的神经基础，并且使用此类任务可能指向不同的神经基础，而这些任务可能与在推理神经科学中通常使用的更抽象和人工任务所观察到的神经基础不同。具体来说，我们推测在争论性上下文中的推理可能依赖于支持内侧前额叶皮层中元表征过程的机制。