Cognitive Neuroscience

The study of attention is central to psychology. This book presents the science of attention in a larger social context, which includes our ability voluntarily to choose and act upon an object of thought. The volume is based on fifty years of research involving behavioral, imaging, developmental, and genetic methods. It describes three brain networks of attention that carry out the functions of obtaining and maintaining the alert state, orienting to sensory events, and regulating responses. The book ties these brain networks to anatomy, connectivity, development, and socialization, and includes material on pathologies that involve attentional networks as well as their role in education and social interaction.

How does motivation work? The classic answer is that people are motivated to approach pleasure and avoid pain, that they are motivated by “carrots and sticks.” But to understand human motivation, it is necessary to go beyond pleasure and pain. What people want is to be effective in their life pursuits, and there are three distinct ways that people want to be effective. They want to be effective in having desired results (value), which includes having pleasure but is not limited to pleasure. They want to be effective in managing what happens (control) and in establishing what's real (truth), even if the process of managing what happens or establishing what's real is painful. These three distinct ways of wanting to be effective go beyond just wanting pleasure, but there is even more to the story of how motivation works. These ways of wanting to be effective do not function in isolation. Rather, they work together. Indeed, the ways that value, truth, and control work together is the central story of motivation. By understanding how motivation works as an organization of value, truth, and control, we can re-think basic motivational issues, such the nature of personality and culture, how the motives of others can be managed effectively, and what is “the good life”.

Damage to a particular area of the brain — the neocortex — is generally understood to result in blindness. Studies of some patients who have suffered from this form of blindness have nevertheless revealed that they can, in fact, discriminate certain types of visual events within their ‘blind’ fields without being aware that they can do so: they think they are only ‘guessing’. This phenomenon has been termed ‘blindsight’ by the author of this book and his collaborators who were among the first to describe it. It continues to attract considerable interest among neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers who see possible implications for theories of perception and consciousness. This book gives an account of the research into a particular case of blindsight, together with a discussion of the historical and neurological background. The empirical findings are followed by a review of other cases reported by other investigators, in which there is a dysjunction between clinical assessment of blindness and unexpected findings of residual function. Finally, a number of theoretical and practical issues and implications are discussed. This reissued version of the text includes a new Introduction summarizing some of the advances that have taken place in the field since the book was first published in 1986.

This book looks at what we have learned over the last century in attempting to discover how the brain enables us to acquire, retain, and use information based on experiences. The major central questions posed in the book are: What processes underlie the formation of new memories? What processes determine the strength of memories? Where are the changes underlying memory located? The chapters in this book review recent progress in research investigating emotion and memory, aging and memory, plasticity of the cerebral cortex, and synaptic connectivity and memory. William James, Ivan Pavlov, Karl Lashley, Donald Hebb, and the other pioneers in this field would, of course, find these topics familiar. But they would also find that in recent years these topics have been investigated in unexpected ways and that the findings have greatly expanded the questions that can be asked as well as the experimental techniques that can be employed.

When people confabulate, they make a false claim that they honestly believe is true. The book contains countless fascinating examples of confabulatory behaviour — people falsely recalling events from their childhood, the subject who was partially blind but insisted he could see, the amputee convinced that he retained all his limbs, to the patient who believed that his own parents had been replaced by imposters. Though confabulations can result from neurological damage, they can also appear in perfectly healthy people. Yet, how can confabulators so often appear to be of sound mind, yet not see their own errors? This book brings together some of the most advanced thinking on confabulation in neuroscience, psychiatry, psychology, and philosophy, in an attempt to understand this phenomenon; what are the clinical symptoms of each type of confabulation? Which brain functions are damaged in clinical confabulators? What are the neuropsychological characteristics of each type? What causes confabulation in healthy individuals? One reason why the study of confabulation is important is that there is wide agreement that the malfunctions that produce confabulation are malfunctions in significant, high-level cognitive processes.

The cognitive and neural sciences have been on the brink of a paradigm shift for over a decade. This book is intended to help galvanize the forces of dynamical systems theory, cognitive and computational neuroscience, connectionism, and ecological psychology that are needed to complete this paradigm shift. The book lays bare the fact that comprehending a spoken sentence, understanding a visual scene, or just thinking about the day's events involves the serial coalescing of different neuronal activation patterns, i.e., a state-space trajectory that flirts with a series of point attractors. As a result, the brain cannot help but spend most of its time instantiating patterns of activity that are in between identifiable mental states rather than in them. The chapters are arranged to present a systematic overview of how perception, cognition, and action are partially overlapping segments of one continuous mental flow, rather than three distinct mental systems. The early chapters provide experiential demonstrations of the gray areas in mental activity that happen in between discretely labeled mental events, as well as geometric visualizations of attractors in state space that make the dynamical-systems framework seem less mathematically abstract. The middle chapters present scores of behavioral and neurophysiological studies that portray the continuous temporal dynamics inherent in categorization, language comprehension, visual perception, as well as attention, action, and reasoning. The final chapters conclude with discussions of what the mind itself must look like if its activity is continuous in time and its contents are distributed in state space.

This volume presents an overview of contemporary work on certain aspects of social engagement across a range of contexts, species, and domains. Early social engagement is defined in terms of its subcomponents and a summary of a number of current biological approaches to the study of social engagement in infants and young children is given. Approach-related behaviour is introduced as an essential but understudied characteristic of temper that indicates developing processes of social engagement. A series of chapters is focused on cognitive capacities related to social-engagement development, including face processing, joint attention, language development, and social cognition. The third section of the volume describes certain contemporary works on social engagement processes in various mammalian species. The chapters deal with the neurobiology of social bonds and material behaviour and certain aspects of play. These demonstrate the current comparative work on the processes of social engagement in juveniles and adults, specifically on neurochemical mechanisms. Evolutionary concepts in social engagement are also presented. The last three chapters focus on two developmental disorders signified by deficits or deviations in social engagement: impairments in social engagement in autism and the unique profile of social engagement in individuals with Williams syndrome. Finally, recent work on some mechanisms involved in the development of difficulties associated with emotional and social functioning in children brought up in institutional environments is summarized.

This book reviews a productive period of research aimed at connecting brain and mind through the use of scalp-recorded brain potentials to chart the temporal course of information processing in the human brain. The book serves as both as a summary of where we have been and as a pointer of the way ahead. Event-related potential (ERP) methodology has long been used in neuroscience to measure electrical activity in the brain. It has become clear, however, that it can be a powerful tool in studying and illuminating central psychological issues relating to attention, information, processing, dynamics, memory, and language. Linking this technology to newer imaging techniques such as positron emission tomography (PET) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), it becomes possible to build up a spatial and temporal picture of the brain during the performance of high-level skills. This book provides strong evidence that cognitive psychology can benefit from the use of brain electrical activity.

Psychologists have always been intrigued in interest, and modern research on interest can be found in nearly every area of the field: researchers studying emotions, cognition, development, education, aesthetics, personality, motivation, and vocations have developed intriguing ideas about what interest is and how it works. This book presents an integrated picture of how interest has been studied in all of the wide-ranging areas of psychology. Using modern theories of cognition and emotion as an integrative framework, it examines the nature of interest, what makes things interesting, the role of interest in personality, and the development of people's idiosyncratic interests, hobbies, and avocations. The examination reveals deep similarities between seemingly different fields of psychology and illustrates the profound importance of interest, curiosity, and intrinsic motivation for understanding why people do what they do. A comprehensive work devoted to interest, this book reviews the history of psychological thought on interest, presents classic and modern research, and suggests fruitful directions for future work.

Neuropsychological data and animal research suggest that hippocampus play both a critical role in episodic learning and memory, and an adaptive role during active navigation. Recent studies have attempted to bridge these disparate theories of hippocampal function by emphasizing the role that hippocampal place cells might play in the processing of spatial information that defines situations in which learning occurs. The book evaluates from behavioral, genetic, physiological, computational, and neural systems perspectives the extent to which the study of place-field properties has informed our understanding of the neural mechanisms of hippocampal-dependent memory.