Cognitive neuroscience investigates the brain mechanisms underlying human mental processing. This field has its roots in cognitive psychology, the scientific study of human mental processing, and behavioral neuroscience, the scientific study of animal brain processing, which have existed for well over a century. Although cognitive neuroscience lies at the intersection of cognitive psychology and behavioral neuroscience, non-invasive methods to investigate human brain function have emerged in only the last few decades. This course will cover the methods of cognitive neuroscience along with fundamental cognitive neuroscience findings on many topics including seeing, hearing, attention, action, memory, language, and social/emotional processing.
What happens in your brain when you are secretly paying attention to a conversation at the next table? How is that conversation recorded into memory? Cognitive neuroscience aims to address such questions by exploring the brain mechanisms that underlie human mental processing. This course will examine the neural basis of core cognitive processes including perception, attention, memory, action, and language (identified using techniques such as functional MRI, event–related potentials, and lesion studies). Other mind–brain topics that will be considered include hemispheric specialization, neural plasticity, frontal lobe function, and consciousness.
For over two centuries, human brain mapping has been conducted by correlating lesion location with impaired behavior. In the last few decades, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) – a noninvasive neuroimaging technique with excellent spatial resolution – has given rise to an explosion of knowledge regarding the role of specific brain regions in particular types of cognitive processing (such as shifting attention or memory retrieval). The aim of this course is to provide an in–depth examination of fMRI by reviewing the physical basis of the fMRI signal and its relation to neural activity in addition to considering issues of experimental design and data analysis. Brain mapping techniques based on lesions and electrophysiology are also discussed.
Memory enables you to have skills, to communicate with other people, to make intelligent decisions, to remember your loved ones, and to know who you are. Without memory, you would not be you. Although human memory has been studied for over two thousand years, the neuroscience of human memory has been studied for only the last three decades. In this course, following an introduction on the types of memory and brain regions of interest, we will discuss the following key topics on the neuroscience of human memory: the tools of cognitive neuroscience, brain regions associated with long–term memory, brain timing associated with long–term memory, long–term memory failure, working memory, implicit memory, memory and other cognitive processes, explicit memory and disease, long–term memory in animals, and the future of memory research.
Over a century ago, William James (1890) wrote “Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought.” Since that time, the study of attention has become one of the core topics of inquiry in the fields of psychology and neuroscience. Despite its apparent simplicity, the cognitive processes and neural mechanisms underlying attention are quite complex. In this course, following an introduction on what attention is and considering the role that attention plays in everyday life, we will discuss the following key topics on the neuroscience of human attention: methods of cognitive neuroscience, deficits in attention, attentional selection in the brain, voluntary and involuntary influences on attention, the control of attention, temporal attention, and predictive coding models of attention.
Cognitive Neuroscience is the study of how human mental processing relates to activity in specific brain regions. In this course, current controversies in Cognitive Neuroscience will be critically examined by evaluating key articles relating to the following questions. Are there category specific processing regions in the brain (e.g., a region specialized for processing faces)? Can visual images be pictorial? Does short–term memory related activity in prefrontal cortex mirror more posterior perception related activity patterns? Do recollection and familiarity – two types of long–term memory – depend on different sub–regions of the medial temporal lobe? Does attention modulate activity in primary visual cortex?