Neural correlates of intelligence as revealed by fMRI of fluid analogies

Abstract

It has been conjectured that the cognitive basis of intelligence is the ability to make fluid or creative analogical relationships between distantly related concepts or pieces of information (Hofstadter, D.R. 1995. Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies. Basic Books, New York., Hofstadter, D.R. 2001. Analogy as the Core of Cognition. In The Analogical Mind: Perspectives from Cognitive Science (D. Gentner, K. J. Holyoak and B. N. Kokinov, Ed.). pp. 504–537. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.). We hypothesised that fluid analogy-making tasks would activate specific regions of frontal cortex that were common to those of previous inferential reasoning tasks. We report here a novel self-paced event-related fMRI study employed to investigate the neural correlates of intelligence associated with undertaking fluid letter string analogy tasks. Stimuli were adapted from items of the AI program Copycat (Mitchell, M. 1993. Analogy-making as Perception: A computer model. The MIT Press, Cambridge MA.). Twelve right-handed adults chose their own "best" completions from four plausible response choices to 55 fluid letter string analogies across a range of analogical depths. An analysis using covariates determined per subject by analogical depth revealed significant bilateral neural activations in the superior, inferior, and middle frontal gyri and in the anterior cingulate/paracingulate cortex. These frontal areas have been previously associated with reasoning tasks involving inductive syllogisms, syntactic hierarchies, and linguistic creativity. A higher-order analysis covarying participants' verbal intelligence measures found correlations with individual BOLD activation strengths in two ROIs within BA 9 and BA 45/46. This is a provocative result given that verbal intelligence is conceptualised as being a measure of crystallised intelligence, while analogy making is conceptualised as requiring fluid intelligence. The results therefore support the conjecture that fluid analogising could underpin general intellectual performance.