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Category: Project

Description: Thinking about the causes of illness is ubiquitous across cultures and highly motivationally relevant. Most societies have “medical experts” whose job it is to diagnose and treat illnesses, but even young children without any medical training reason about illness in sophisticated ways from an early age. Currently, little is known about the neurocognitive mechanisms that enable causal reasoning about illness. The proposed project uses a sentence reading neuroimaging (fMRI) paradigm to investigate this question. Specifically, we will ask participants to read two-sentence vignettes that elicit causal inferences about illness while in the scanner. In addition to reading illness vignettes, participants will read vignettes that elicit causal inferences about a non-illness domain (physical reasoning) and vignettes that contain causally unconnected sentences (noncausal control). All participants will subsequently complete two localizer tasks that will enable us to localize three functional networks of interest (language, logic, social reasoning networks). We will then use these functional networks to interpret the locations of univariate results from the main experiment and to create search spaces for multivariate analysis.