Recruitment of the pre-motor area in human inductive reasoning: An fMRI study

Recent studies indicated that the pre-motor area may be recruited in human higher level cognitive functions, including inductive reasoning. In the present study, a typical task of inductive reasoning, function-finding, was explored using functional MRI. fMRI results showed the significant activation of bilateral pre-motor cortex (BA 6), and its left lateralization. Taking together the previous studies and the present experimental design, we concluded that the left pre-motor cortex in the present study may associate with implicit relation synthesis, while the right pre-motor cortex may reflect spatial information processing involved in arithmetic rules.