Reasoning and Problem Solving: Models

The ability to draw new conclusions from known facts and hypotheses is central to human thought, enabling syllogistic reasoning, problem solving, causal reasoning, and analogical inference. We review contemporary psychological theories and emerging neuroscience evidence from each domain. Current neuroscience research demonstrates that reasoning is typically mediated by broadly distributed neural systems that are highly sensitive to the semantic content and cognitive demands of the reasoning problem. This article provides preliminary support for psychological theories that advocate modality-specific representations and endorse multiple reasoning systems.