Analogical reasoning is central to thought and learning. However, previous neuroscience studies have focused mainly on neural substrates for visuospatial and semantic analogies. There has not yet been research on the neural correlates of analogical reasoning on syntactic patterns generated by the syntactic rules, a key feature of human language faculty. The present investigation took an initial step to address this paucity. Twenty-four participants, whose brain activity was monitored by fMRI, engaged in first-order and second-order relational judgments of syntactic patterns as well as simple and complex working memory tasks. After scanning, participants rated the difficulty of each step during analogical reasoning; these ratings were related to signal intensities in activated regions of interest using Spearman correlation analyses. After prior research, differences in activation levels during second-order and first-order relational judgments were taken as evidence of analogical reasoning. These analyses showed that analogical reasoning on syntactic patterns recruited brain regions consistent with those supporting visuospatial and semantic analogies, including the anterior and posterior parts of the left middle frontal gyrus, anatomically corresponding to the left rostrolateral pFC and the left dorsolateral pFC. The correlation results further revealed that the posterior middle frontal gyrus might be involved in analogical access and mapping with syntactic patterns. Our study is the first to investigate the process of analogical reasoning on syntactic patterns at the neurobiological level and provide evidence of the specific functional roles of related regions during subprocesses of analogical reasoning.

类比推理是思维和学习的核心。然而，之前的神经科学研究主要集中在视觉空间和语义类比的神经基础上。目前还没有关于类比推理与句法规则生成的句法模式的神经相关性的研究，句法规则是人类语言能力的一个关键特征。本次调查为解决这一问题迈出了第一步。 24 名参与者的大脑活动受到功能磁共振成像的监测，他们进行了句法模式的一阶和二阶关系判断以及简单和复杂的工作记忆任务。扫描完成后，参与者在类比推理中对每一步的难度进行评分；使用斯皮尔曼相关分析，这些评级与激活的感兴趣区域的信号强度相关。经过前期研究，二阶和一阶关系判断时激活水平的差异被作为类比推理的证据。这些分析表明，句法模式的类比推理所招募的大脑区域与支持视觉空间和语义类比的大脑区域一致，包括左额中回的前部和后部，在解剖学上对应于左前外侧 pFC 和左背外侧 pFC。相关结果进一步表明，额中后回可能参与类比访问和句法模式映射。我们的研究首次在神经生物学水平上研究句法模式的类比推理过程，并为类比推理子过程中相关区域的特定功能作用提供证据。