Characterizing Behavioral and Brain Changes Associated with Practicing Reasoning Skills
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Mackey-2015-Characterizing Behav.pdf
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2 MB
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Author(s)
Miller Singley, Alison T.
Wendelken, Carter
Bunge, Silvia A.
Mackey, Allyson
Date Issued
September 2015
Journal
PLOS ONE
Publisher
Public Library of Science
Citation
Mackey, Allyson P., Alison T. Miller Singley, Carter Wendelken, and Silvia A. Bunge. “Characterizing Behavioral and Brain Changes Associated with Practicing Reasoning Skills.” Edited by Sam Gilbert. PLoS ONE 10, no. 9 (September 14, 2015): e0137627.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
We have reported previously that intensive preparation for a standardized test that taxes reasoning leads to changes in structural and functional connectivity within the frontoparietal network. Here, we investigated whether reasoning instruction transfers to improvement on unpracticed tests of reasoning, and whether these improvements are associated with changes in neural recruitment during reasoning task performance. We found behavioral evidence for transfer to a transitive inference task, but no evidence for transfer to a rule generation task. Across both tasks, we observed reduced lateral prefrontal activation in the trained group relative to the control group, consistent with other studies of practice-related changes in brain activation. In the transitive inference task, we observed enhanced suppression of task-negative, or default-mode, regions, consistent with work suggesting that better cognitive skills are associated with more efficient switching between networks. In the rule generation task, we found a pattern consistent with a training-related shift in the balance between phonological and visuospatial processing. Broadly, we discuss general methodological considerations related to the analysis and interpretation of training-related changes in brain activation. In summary, we present preliminary evidence for changes in brain activation associated with practice of high-level cognitive skills.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0137627
