TMS applied to V1 can facilitate reasoning.

Visual mental imagery is the subjective experience of seeing objects or events in front of the 'inner eye', although they are not actually present. Previous research indicates that (1) visual images help to remember what has been experienced in the past or when objects need to be inspected or manipulated, and (2) visual images are correlated with neural activity in early visual cortices, demonstrating a possible overlap between visual imagery and visual perception. However, recent research revealed that visual imagery can also disrupt cognitive processes and impede thinking.

Uncertain relational reasoning in the parietal cortex.

The psychology of reasoning is currently transitioning from the study of deductive inferences under certainty to inferences that have degrees of uncertainty in both their premises and conclusions; however, only a few studies have explored the cortical basis of uncertain reasoning. Using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), we show that areas in the right superior parietal lobe (rSPL) are necessary for solving spatial relational reasoning problems under conditions of uncertainty. Twenty-four participants had to decide whether a single presented order of objects agreed with a given set of indeterminate premises that could be interpreted in more than one way.

The role of the temporal lobe in contextual sentence integration: A single-pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation study.

Neuroimaging studies have shown the left temporal lobe to be important for contextual sentence integration. This study used single-pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to establish stronger causal evidence for the role of this brain region and also explored the involvement of the same cortical region in the right hemisphere (RH). In a semantic decision task, sentences with different cloze probability endings (highly expected, unexpected, and semantically anomalous) were presented to 59 participants.