Principles of Cognitive Neuroscience
EXAM 1
CHAPTER 1
1. Cognitive science seeks to understand the information processing associated
with functions like perception, memory, and decision making.
2. Neuroscience seeks to characterize the structure and function of the nervous
system.
3. Cognitive neuroscience is a new discipline that applies research methods
from neuroscience to the functions and behaviours studied by cognitive
science.
4. Cognitive neuroscientists use diverse research methods and experimental
paradigms to develop models of mental function and behaviour.
Cognition: “Higher-order” mental processes.
Cognitive functions: The set of processes that allow humans and many other animals
to perceive external stimuli, to extract key information and hold it in memory, and
ultimately to generate thoughts and actions that help reach desired goals.
Mind: The full spectrum of a person’s awareness (one aspect of consciousness) at
any point in time, reflecting sensory percepts, as well as thoughts, feelings, goals,
desires, and so on.
Behaviourism: A perspective in cognitive psychology that holds that only directly
observable behavior, and not internal mental states, can be studied scientifically.
Cognitive science: A scientific discipline that seeks to understand and model the
information processing associated with cognitive functions.
Cognitive models: A explanatory framework that invokes unobserved internal states
to predict how stimuli lead to actions.
,Psychological construct: A theoretical concept, often generated by converging
results across experiments, that cannot be directly observed but serves to explain
and unify a body of research.
Nervous system: The network of nerve cells throughout the body.
Cerebral cortex: The superficial gray matter of the cerebellum
Phrenology: Originating in the early nineteenth century, the attempt to create maps
of brain function based on the pattern of bumps and valleys on the surface of the
skull.
Localization of functions: The idea that the brain may have distinct regions that
support particular cognitive functions.
Neurons: Also called nerve cell. A cell specialized for the conduction and
transmission of electrical signals in the nervous system.
Action potentials: The electrical signal conducted along neuronal axons by which
information is conveyed from one place to another in the nervous system.
Neurotransmitters: A chemical agent released at synapses that mediates signaling
between nerve cells.
Synapses: A specialized point of contact between the axon of a neuron (the
presynaptic cell) and a target (postsynaptic) cell. Information is transferred between
the presynaptic and postsynaptic cells by the release and receipt of biochemical
neurotransmitters.
Cognitive neuroscience: A scientific discipline that seeks to create models that
explain the interrelations between brain function and cognitive functions.
Neural correlates: A measure of brain function that covaries with the expression of a
cognitive function.
Individual differences: Variation in a cognitive function or other trait across people,
often as can be related to a particular biological predictor.
Convergence: The combination of results across multiple experimental paradigms,
often to support inferences about an unobservable internal state.
,Complementarity: The combination of data across multiple methods for measuring
brain function, often to improve inferences about the nature of the generative neural
processes.
Meta-analysis: The approach of combining results from multiple experiments, usually
published studies that vary in their research methods, to improve the specificity and
generalizability of the inferences that can be drawn.
CHAPTER 2
1. The technical approaches that have made it increasingly possible to link the
inferences and concepts of cognitive psychology to their neural underpinnings
are diverse and continually improving. The approaches that have been most
effective to date fall into two major categories: brain perturbation and
neuromonitoring.
2. Methods that perturb the brain in some way allow inferences to be made
about the role of specific brain areas or brain systems in particular cognitive
functions. Approaches that entail perturbation include the natural disturbances
of brain function that arise from trauma, stroke, or disease; perturbations
induced pharmacologically; and perturbations induced by electrical stimulation
of relevant brain regions. The latter methods include direct intracranial
electrical stimulation, mostly in animals, as well as stimulation of brain tissue
through the skull using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and
transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS).
3. Methods that measure neural activity during cognitive tasks provide
information about the specific neural activity patterns that are engaged during
the processing of a specific type of stimulus or the performance of a specific
cognitive task. The major activity-measuring techniques associated with
cognitive processes include invasive electrical recording in experimental
animals, non-invasive electrical or magnetic recording in humans, and both
non-invasive and invasive imaging methods that depend on altered
metabolism and/or blood flow in active brain regions.
, 4. In single-unit electrophysiological recording, metal electrodes are inserted into
the brain structures of experimental animals to measure the action potentials
produced by individual neurons. Animal researchers are also increasingly
investigating the nonspike fluctuations in the dendritic local field potentials.]
5. Electroencephalography (EEG) is a non-invasive method for recording the
brain’s electrical signals from the scalp, which reflects the volume-conducted
dendritic field potentials. EEG and the event-related potentials (ERPs) that
can be extracted from EEG data via time-locked averaging have been widely
used in the study of human brain activity.
6. EEG and ERPs have counterparts in magnetoencephalography (MEG) and
event-related field responses (ERFs), which measure magnetic-field
fluctuations due to neuronal currents rather than the associated voltage
fluctuations. These methods all have high temporal resolution but coarse
spatial resolution.
7. Techniques of three-dimensional functional brain imaging have revolutionized
cognitive neuroscience with their ability to visualize brain activity during
cognitive task performance. The first of these to be widely used, positron
emission tomography (PET), can localize brain activity during extended task
blocks, but it requires the use of radioactive isotopes and has essentially no
temporal resolution. Accordingly, it has been largely supplanted in cognitive
research by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which has much
higher temporal resolution (although it is still much lower than that of
electrophysiological methods) and can be performed in an event-related way.
8. Much work has been devoted to advancing analytic methods for fMRI in order
to enhance the ability to make inferences from the brain activity patterns.
Such methods include using multivoxel pattern analysis to examine consistent
variations in the spatial patterns of activity locally within an area and using
repetition suppression to examine the activations of intermingled neural
populations within an area. Considerable research has also been devoted to
