Summary Principles of Cognitive Neuroscience for course UU Cognitive Neuroscience ()
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Cognitive Neurosciences (200300074)
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Universiteit Utrecht (UU)
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Principles of Cognitive Neuroscience
This is a very extensive summary of the book Principles of Cognitive Neuroscience, used in the course Cognitive Neuroscience () at Utrecht University. It includes everything from the book.
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Principles of Cognitive Neuroscience – Summary
Chapter 1 – Cognitive Neuroscience: Definitions, Themes, and Approaches
Introduction:
Cognitive neuroscience is a relatively new discipline that has arisen from the recent marriage of
neuroscience and cognitive science.
o Neuroscience: a biomedical field that has flourished both conceptually and technically during
the past century.
o Cognitive science: a field of study rooted in the long-standing interest of natural philosophers
and psychologists in understanding human mental processes.
Research in cognitive neuroscience integrates investigations of brain structure and function, and seeks
to measure cognitive abilities and behaviour to understand how the human brain works at all levels.
Cognitive neuroscientists study both human and non-human animals with a diverse set of tools.
o It seeks to build on its parent fields by developing new models of cognitive functions that
integrate ideas from both neuroscience and cognitive science.
Cognition:
Cognition refers to the set of processes (cognitive functions) 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.
The mind consists of our subjective conscious experiences.
Natural philosophy and early psychology:
o Without experimental means to understand mental life, philosophers historically drew
conclusions about cognition based on introspection and reasoning.
o In the nineteenth century, the first true scientists to address these sorts of issues built models
of mental processes through behavioural observation and experimental manipulation.
Behaviourism:
o By the beginning of the twentieth century there was a growing dissatisfaction with the lack of
systematic progress in the study of mental processes.
o This approach is called behaviourism and rejected subjective work on mental functions as
being outside the domain of proper scientific inquiry.
o The simple recognition that food rewards made rats more likely to engage in whatever
behaviour occurred immediately before the reward (operant conditioning) led to an
explosion of interest in methods for reinforcing or discouraging specific behaviours.
o Because the basic processes of learning were thought to be a common feature of species with
complex nervous systems, the typical subjects of psychological research were non-human
animals, rats and pigeons in particular.
o But the behaviourist approach was enthusiastically applied to human problems as well.
o The focus of behaviourists on learning from rewards led them to ignore other cognitive
functions.
Although they did not deny the existence of mental states and the cognitive
functions that those states implied, behaviourists dismissed those states as
inappropriate topics for scientific study, arguing that psychological concepts could
be discussed only in terms of the experimental manipulations that evoked them (a
view sometimes called operationism).
Cognitive science:
o In the mid-twentieth century, a confluence of factors revived the legitimacy of psychological
research on cognitive functions.
One factor was the advent of computational science.
Research from the field of information theory gave new insights into
perception, memory and motor performance.
Memory was not a passive representation of sensory stimuli, but an active
recoding of the information the stimuli carried.
o The field of artificial intelligence suggested that elementary computations could combine
unexpected ways to support complex reasoning.
, o In the 1950s and 1960s, some leading psychologists challenged the behaviourist concept of
operationism, arguing that psychological states and processes exist independently of the
experiment that defined them.
Chomsky argued convincingly in 1959 that behaviourism could never explain the
structural and generative properties of mental phenomena such as human language.
He showed that the inferences drawn by behaviourists could not eliminate
psychological states.
Their experiments could not account for even simple elements of real-world
behaviour.
o Emboldened by these criticisms, psychologists began to involve more human participants in
their research and to investigate high-level, conscious processes.
o The term cognitive science unifies research on mental processes regardless of the specific
topic, experimental approach, method or even discipline.
It focuses on information processing associated with cognitive functions.
These scientists share an interest in characterizing the phenomena and behaviour
associated with specific cognitive functions, and in creating cognitive models that
describe the underlying psychological processes.
o Cognitive models predict how sensory input leads to some behavioural output.
The psychological processes invoked in cognitive science models do not necessarily
map onto specific physical processes in the brain, and many cognitive scientists are
not especially interested in such mappings.
The models make some sense of complex cognitive phenomena, provide insights
into the common outcomes of different experiments, and facilitate generalizations
about experimental results.
o The elements of cognitive models are sometimes called psychological constructs, in
recognition of the fact that they are created to help explain diverse phenomena without
reference to their ultimate causes in the brain.
Neuroscience:
Nervous systems are found in all but the simplest animals.
The field of neuroscience is concerned with how the nervous systems of humans and other animals
are organized and function.
Early knowledge about nervous system function came primarily from clinical cases and took a
relatively holistic view of brain function, although more was known about brain structure.
The state of knowledge changed only slowly over the succeeding centuries.
o Physicians knew that cognition was generated by the brain, but they lacked ways to
systematically investigate cognition or to heal its deficits.
By the early nineteenth century, physicians with a scientific bent had become particularly interested in
the functional properties of the cerebral cortex.
Gall hypothesized that the size of the cerebral cortex (and thus the extent of the function or trait)
could be mapped by measuring bumps on the overlying skull.
o Gall’s hypothesis led to a new approach to studying brain function called phrenology.
o The phrenologists in the first half of the nineteenth century mapped the skulls of ordinary
people, and even non-human animals.
o From these measurements, the constructed detailed maps that assigned different functions
and traits (memory, color vision, vanity, moral fiber, and many others) to different parts of
the cortex.
o Phrenology faded as it gradually became clear that the measurements of the skull bore no
relation to the underlying structure of the brain, let alone its function.
Phrenology made an important contribution to modern neuroscience.
o It introduced the idea that different parts of the brain contribute to different sorts of
information processing.
o This idea is known as localization of function.
The identification of neurons as separate cells in the decades just before the twentieth century was a
major turning point.
o This finding implied that cognitive processes are carried out by large populations of neurons.
, Parallel and indeed earlier work on the electrical properties of neurons showed that signal are
transmitted long distances along neuronal axons by action potentials.
By the early twentieth century, researchers had developed recording techniques that could track
changes in these electrical signals, they had begun to explore the chemical substances that neurons
use to stimulate the cells they contact.
o These neurotransmitters are now known to be released by the terminals of neuronal axons at
specialized contacts called synapses, where the transmitters then bind to receptor molecules
on target neurons and other cells, thus altering the membrane potential of the cell contacted.
o The action of neurotransmitters at synapses was soon understood to be the major way that
information travels between cells in nervous systems.
o The signaling processes of neurons require energy derived from oxygen and metabolites
supplied by the vascular system, and measurements of increased energy consumption and
blood flow in active brain regions provide the bases for the imaging methods essential to
many brain studies today.
By the early twentieth century, neuroscientists possessed the experimental techniques for addressing
questions about functional localization in a rigorous way as evident in the pioneering studies of
functional localization and reflex circuitry in experimental animals.
o Penfield sought better ways of mapping the cerebral cortex in order to minimize the damage
to normal brain tissue as he removed a tumor or a focus of epileptic seizures.
o At the outset of a neurosurgical session, Penfield applied weak electrical currents to the
exposed cerebral cortex of the patient.
o Changing the location of stimulation and monitoring the resulting sensations allowed Penfield
to create a systematic map of the somatosensory cortex.
o The same approach revealed the organization of the motor cortex, as well as some of the
structural organization of the frontal lobes.
Electrical stimulation was only one of the many approaches eventually used by modern neuroscience.
o Single neurons change their firing rate in response to specific information, as in the exquisite
sensitivity of neurons in primary visual cortex to a bar of light moving through a particular
part of visual space.
o Clinical neuroscience has now shown that neurological conditions such as Parkinson’s disease
and Alzheimer’s disease reflect specific cellular problems, while psychiatric disorders such as
depression arise from neurotransmitter dysfunction.
The Neurobiological Approach to Cognition:
Cognitive neuroscience is defined by work at the intersection of cognitive science and neuroscience.
o It combines all the difficulties of measuring brain function with all the problems of trying to
accurately assess cognition and behaviour, as well as the complexities of trying to link them
together.
One common misconception is that cognitive neuroscience simply maps the brain regions that are
activated during psychological process, sometimes called the search for neural correlated of cognition.
Much current research combines information about brain structure and function to create
neurobiologically grounded models of cognition.
The development of cognitive neuroscience models also has important practical applications.
o An example is studies of individual differences.
o Understanding how and why people differ in their cognitive abilities is a major area of
research in psychology, medicine and epidemiology.
o By linking individual differences in cognition to individual differences in brain function,
researchers have begun to understand the neural bases for both typical and atypical
cognition at any stage of the human life span.
o Differences in cognitive abilities can provide a link between genes and behaviour as well.
Cognitive neuroscience seeks to create biologically grounded models of cognitive function.
o Such models draw inspiration from prior work in cognitive science, while accommodating
new developments and findings in neuroscience.
o As a result, cognitive neuroscience models can inform and constrain prior cognitive science
models, and point out new direction for neuroscience research.
, Methods, Convergence and Complementarity:
It can apply any of the various neuroscience methods appropriate for measuring or manipulating the
physiological processes.
o The electrical signaling of neurons, the activity of neurotransmitters, and their supporting
metabolic processes.
The experimental and methodological diversity allows cognitive neuroscientists to explore a given
topic in many different ways.
Using multiple methods provides two critical advantages.
o Convergence and complementarity.
Convergence describes the approach of combining results from multiple experimental paradigms to
illuminate a single theoretical concept.
o The application of converging methods to psychology helped shift that field away from
behaviourism.
o Convergence is often facilitated by meta-analytic methods, which are becoming increasingly
central to cognitive neuroscience research.
Cognitive neuroscience also benefits from the complementarity of its research methods, each of which
provides a different sort of information about brain function.
o Because brain function is expressed through many diverse physiological changes, cognitive
neuroscientists use a welter of research methods that provide insight into different aspects of
physiology.
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).
Electroencephalography (EEG).
Positron emission tomography (PET).
Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS).
Single-neuron recording.
Neurological disorders.
Lesion studies.
Assessment of behaviour.
Etc.
o None of these techniques provide a complete accounting of brain function.
Some techniques provide information about brain metabolism (PET) and blood
oxygenation (fMRI) induced by neural activity.
Others indicate how single neurons send information (single-unit recording) or
integrate information from other neurons (local field potentials and EEG).
And the techniques vary in whether they are more sensitive to rapid changes in
brain activity or to slower changes, and whether they collect information from single
neurons, small portions of the brain, or the brain as a whole.
Perturbation techniques (TMS, drug administration, lesion studies) alter brain
function and thus can be used to evaluate how specific brain regions or systems
contribute causally to specific cognitive processes.
Each technique carries distinct strengths and limitations, so the results obtained
from multiple techniques are much more compelling that results derived from only a
single approach.
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