Paradoxical Reasoning: An fMRI Study

Antigoni Belekou; Charalabos Papageorgiou; Efstratios Karavasilis; Eleftheria Tsaltas; Nikolaos Kelekis; Christoph Klein; Nikolaos Smyrnis

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2022.850491

Paradoxical Reasoning: An fMRI Study

Front Psychol. 2022 May 2:13:850491. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.850491. eCollection 2022.

Authors

Antigoni Belekou^{1

2}, Charalabos Papageorgiou², Efstratios Karavasilis³, Eleftheria Tsaltas², Nikolaos Kelekis³, Christoph Klein^{4

5

6}, Nikolaos Smyrnis^{1

4}

Affiliations

¹ Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Sensorimotor Control, University Mental Health, Neurosciences and Precision Medicine Research Institute "COSTAS STEFANIS", Athens, Greece.
² First Department of Psychiatry, Eginition Hospital, Medical School, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Athens, Greece.
³ Second Department of Radiology, General University Hospital "ATTIKON", Medical School, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Athens, Greece.
⁴ Second Department of Psychiatry, General University Hospital "ATTIKON", Medical School, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Athens, Greece.
⁵ Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Medical Faculty, University of Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany.
⁶ Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Medical Faculty, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany.

Abstract

Paradoxes are a special form of reasoning leading to absurd inferences in contrast to logical reasoning that is used to reach valid conclusions. A functional MRI (fMRI) study was conducted to investigate the neural substrates of paradoxical and deductive reasoning. Twenty-four healthy participants were scanned using fMRI, while they engaged in reasoning tasks based on arguments, which were either Zeno's like paradoxes (paradoxical reasoning) or Aristotelian arguments (deductive reasoning). Clusters of significant activation for paradoxical reasoning were located in bilateral inferior frontal and middle temporal gyrus. Clusters of significant activation for deductive reasoning were located in bilateral superior and inferior parietal lobe, precuneus, and inferior frontal gyrus. These results confirmed that different brain activation patterns are engaged for paradoxical vs. deductive reasoning providing a basis for future studies on human physiological as well as pathological reasoning.

Keywords: deductive reasoning; fMRI; fronto-parietal brain activation patterns; fronto-temporal brain activation patterns; paradoxical syllogism.