12 - Cognitive neuroscience

Summary

Cognitive neuroscience may be roughly divided into four subfields: clinical studies of neurological patients, non-invasive brain imaging methods, electrophysiology, and computational modeling. Lesion studies have provided a wealth of scientific data showing the cortical and subcortical localization of various aspects of cognitive phenomena. Three cognitive phenomena are chosen for discussion: episodic memory, decision making, and category learning. Before considering episodic memory, or the memory of personal experience, this chapter first considers memory formation at the (subcognitive) level of neurons and synapses. It is widely believed that memory is accomplished by the change in strength of synapses, or synaptic plasticity. S.J. Martin, P. Grimwood, and R.G.M. Morris suggest several criteria for establishing the synaptic plasticity and memory (SPM) hypothesis. The chapter introduces dynamic neural field (DNF) models. These basic models capture fundamental characteristics of neural organization, describing both neural and behavioral data.