Cognitive Neuroscience

Abstract

Contemporary cognitive neuroscience is a large interdisciplinary effort to understand the neural foundations of human experience and behaviour. As such it encompasses many sub-domains relating to cognition, affect and overt behavior. With the aim of understanding crucial psychological functions in humans, cognitive neuroscience has incorporated a range of disciplines, experimental procedures and measurement methods. Central to cognitive neuroscience is the measurement of brain activity since most mental operations occur with a high degree of automaticity that precludes assessment via self-report or direct observation of human motoric behavior. Beyond the measurement of central nervous system activity, cognitive neuroscience has more recently been complemented by perspectives that integrate the autonomic and neuroendocrine systems that stand in continuous cyclical interaction with the brain. Such central-peripheral interactions play key roles in several mental operations and functions including language, cognition, consciousness, perception, affect, and motor behavior. Advances in the measurement and computational modelling of brain activity have crucially enriched cognitive neuroscience as well as the study of abnormal deviations of psychological functioning in patients with neurological and mental disorders. This DSP brings together a faculty from psychology, computer science, linguistics, biology and neurology to get at the heart of human neural functioning. Synergy emerges on the level of measurements (large infrastructure such as fMRI, MEG, EEG), on student training in these methods and in the various different angles that are taken on how human information processing supports day to day functioning and how this functioning may be disturbed.