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Does anterior lateral prefrontal cortex play a domain-general role in reasoning?

Poster Session F - Tuesday, March 10, 2026, 8:00 – 10:00 am PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom

Margaret Vashel¹ (), Allison Chen¹, Natalie Kwak¹, Silvia Bunge¹; ¹University of California, Berkeley

The capacity to jointly consider multiple structured mental representations, or relations, is foundational to reasoning. An anterior portion of lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC) has been consistently implicated in higher-order relational thinking (i.e., comparing relations between sets of items), and has been theorized to sit atop a rostro-caudal abstraction hierarchy within LPFC. However, this hypothesis has not been extensively vetted. Here, we explore (1) whether any anterior LPFC Glasser parcels exhibit domain-generality in relational thinking across sensory modalities and types of stimuli and relations, and (2) whether there exists a gradient towards greater abstraction from stimulus characteristics moving rostrally in lateral PFC. To these ends, we designed a relational matching fMRI paradigm with a 2×2×2 design: sensory modality (visual, auditory) × relation type (spatial (“where”) and featural (“what”) relational judgments) × relational complexity (1st-order, 2nd-order relations). Univariate contrasts (2nd-order > 1st-order conditions) showed robust overlap across all four tasks in bilateral anterior and posterior LPFC (N=59 young adults). However, multivariate pattern analyses revealed more fine-grained patterns of sensitivity to relational complexity, sensory modality, and relation type within LPFC parcels. Representational dimensionality increased along a caudal-to-rostral axis – inconsistent with the theorized gradient of increasing abstraction. Additionally, across LPFC, neural similarity among tasks is higher for 2nd-order than 1st-order relations, suggesting greater cross-task overlap when the tasks invite abstraction. These findings refine our understanding of anterior LPFC: rather than encoding abstract relations uniformly, it may house flexible, high-dimensional representations that enable reasoning and other higher cognitive functions.

Topic Area: THINKING: Reasoning