Skip Navigation



Cerebral Cortex Advance Access published online on December 7, 2006
Cerebral Cortex, doi:10.1093/cercor/bhl132
This Article
Right arrow Full Text Freely available
Right arrow FREE Full Text (PDF) Freely available
Right arrow Supplementary Material
Right arrow All Versions of this Article:
17/10/2245    most recent
bhl132v1
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Similar articles in PubMed
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to My Personal Archive
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Goel, V.
Right arrow Articles by Grafman, J.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
PubMed
Right arrow PubMed Citation
Right arrow Articles by Goel, V.
Right arrow Articles by Grafman, J.
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us  
What's this?

Published by Oxford University Press 2006.

Hemispheric Specialization in Human Prefrontal Cortex for Resolving Certain and Uncertain Inferences

Vinod Goel1, Michael Tierney2, Laura Sheesley2, Angela Bartolo1, Oshin Vartanian1 and Jordan Grafman2

1 Department of Psychology, York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M3J 1P3, 2 Cognitive Neuroscience Section, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, USA

Address correspondence to email: vgoel{at}yorku.ca.

Uncertainty is a fact of life that must be accommodated in real-world decision making. Although it has been suggested that the right prefrontal cortex (PFC) has a special role to play in decision making under uncertainty, there is very little hard data to support this hypothesis. To better understand the roles of left and right PFCs in reasoning and decision making in situations with complete and incomplete information, we administered simple inference problems to 18 patients with lateralized focal lesions to PFC (9 right hemisphere, 9 left hemisphere) and 22 age- and education-matched normal controls. The stimuli were systematically manipulated for completeness of information regarding the status of the conclusion. Our results demonstrated a 2-way interaction such that patients with left PFC lesions were selectively impaired in trials with complete information, whereas patients with right PFC lesions were selectively impaired in trials with incomplete information. These results provide compelling evidence for hemispheric specialization for reasoning in PFC and suggest that the right PFC has a critical role to play in reasoning about incompletely specified situations. We postulate this role involves the maintenance of ambiguous mental representations that temper premature overinterpretation by the left hemisphere.

Key Words: decision making • frontal lobes • indeterminacy • lateralization • lesions • reasoning


Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us    What's this?


This article has been cited by other articles:


Home page
 Phil Trans R Soc BHome page
A. Snyder
Explaining and inducing savant skills: privileged access to lower level, less-processed information
Phil Trans R Soc B, May 27, 2009; 364(1522): 1399 - 1405.
[Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

Home page
 Phil Trans R Soc BHome page
D. Stout, N. Toth, K. Schick, and T. Chaminade
Neural correlates of Early Stone Age toolmaking: technology, language and cognition in human evolution
Phil Trans R Soc B, June 12, 2008; 363(1499): 1939 - 1949.
[Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]


Disclaimer: Please note that abstracts for content published before 1996 were created through digital scanning and may therefore not exactly replicate the text of the original print issues. All efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, but the Publisher will not be held responsible for any remaining inaccuracies. If you require any further clarification, please contact our Customer Services Department.