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Advances in neuroimaging methods and techniques and interest in understanding the neural bases of psychological phenomena are rapidly changing how the capacity for self-control is being addressed. An approach dubbed Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (SCAN) integrates research across multiple levels of analysis, leading to important findings that link the basic social, cognitive, and affective processes underlying self-control to their neural substrates. This chapter illustrates how a SCAN approach can be useful for addressing questions including the problem of how to enable researchers from different areas with different types of expertise and interests in self-control to communicate with one another and most effectively use each other’s (sometimes highly technical) theories and methods. Towards this end, we begin by describing the basic goals of SCAN and some of the key challenges facing researchers who adopt this approach. We then describe how this approach is currently being used to build an integrative understanding of the processes underlying a particular type of self-control process that involves actively reinterpreting the meaning of an emotionally evocative stimulus to meet and/or modulate ones’ feelings. We conclude by discussing important future research directions in this area.

Brain imaging has become widely applied to the study of aging because of substantial advances in technology and the diffusion of this technology throughout the world of human neuroscience. These advances together with better clinical characterization and more sophisticated molecular approaches now permit us to better understand relationships between brain aging and brain disease. In this setting, the concept of “normal aging” may become better defined by our ability to clearly characterize chemistry, anatomy, and physiology of the aging brain using multimodal approaches. Future directions for this cognitive neuroscience of aging will be the detection of presymptomatic forms of age-related disease, understanding how different diseases interact in normal older people, and the definition of age-related processes that are independent of disease and that affect specific cognitive, anatomic, and neurochemical systems.

This chapter argues that cognitive neuroscience has three main issues with respect to the current field of neuroethics. First, cognitive neuroscience can help with some current ethical dilemmas such as whether the embryo has the moral status of a human being. Secondly, there are important ethical areas to which neuroscientists are being asked to contribute when, in fact, they should not be. For instance, neuroscience has nothing to say about concepts such as free will and personal responsibility, and it probably also has nothing to say about such things as antisocial thoughts. Finally, cognitive neuroscience is building an understanding of how brain research will instruct us on ideas like universal morals possessed by all members of our species. This fundamental development will find cognitive neuroscience becoming central to the modern world's view of ethical universals.

This chapter explores converging and diverging issues between genetic and neuroimaging science research and clinical applications. It shows how genetics is intensely communal and familial, while the study of the central nervous system is more focused on the individual. Nonetheless, we learn how the ‘therapeutic gap’ gene hype, and the risk of scientific over-promising from both can lead to advances that may make situations worse before they make them better.

Michael S. Gazzaniga carried out original studies of human brain laterality and function in split-brain patients, work that has rich implications for consciousness, free will, and the self. He introduced the term cognitive neuroscience, helped develop the discipline, and founded the discipline’s flagship journal. More recently, he has effectively written several books for a broad audience about brain and mind, showing generations of readers the human face of science.

This chapter describes three methodological approaches of cognitive neuroscience of aging, and for each one, it underscores some interesting findings and notes some current issues. These are the neuropsychological approach, correlational approach, and activation imaging approach. The neuropsychological approach compares cognitive changes in healthy aging and in patients with brain damage due to trauma, stroke, or degenerative disorders. The correlational approach associates cognitive measures to neural measures that were independently obtained. The activation imaging approach measures brain activity in young and older adults during cognitive performance.

This chapter details studies on learning and memory by Donald Hebb and Brenda Milner. The leading hypothesis for the neural basis of learning and memory is due to Donald Hebb, as presented in a textbook in 1949; the activity-dependent Hebb synapse remains the focus of much current research. Research in the 1950s extended cortical studies to the limbic lobe, reporting the first evidence for neural mechanisms in the amygdala and other subcortical structures related to emotional behavior. A new chapter in studies of the brain opened with surgical operations for the relief of epilepsy, which showed the critical role of the hippocampus in memory. Bilateral removal of the hippocampus for relief of chronic debilitating epilepsy rendered a patient, H. M., unable to form new memories. A series of studies of H. M., beginning in 1957 and lasting for half a century, by Brenda Milner, delineated the role of the hippocampus in the formation of memories, and launched the new field of cognitive neuroscience.

This chapter considers what the near future of the science of false memory may hold by exploring some emerging areas of experimentation. It focuses on three specific areas: mathematical models of false memory, aging effects, and cognitive neuroscience.

This chapter is centered on a discussion of the architecture of schools, including three examples of existing schools. It includes a discussion of how cognitive neuroscience is helping to understand the experiences of children in classroom settings. An important portion of this chapter is devoted to descriptions of potential hypotheses (with background introductions) related to children in classrooms.

The chapter focuses on the relationship between the brain and behavior, and discusses both how methods play an important role in cognitive neuroscience, as well as the contributions made by Michael Gazzaniga in the field of cognitive neuroscience. Gazzaniga, who is considered to be the greatest ambassador of cognitive neuroscience, launched the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience and created the Cognitive Neuroscience Society for better understanding and development in the discipline of cognitive neuroscience. Lesion studies and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) are two important methods, and the author discusses their significance in studying the relationship between the human brain and behavior.

One of the most exciting recent developments to emerge from cognitive neuroscience, with the potential to impact significantly both on our understanding of music and of the therapeutic uses of music, is the discovery of the so-called human mirror neuron system (MNS). In essence, the MNS allows us to understand and predict the behaviour of others, by engaging the neural regions required to produce such behaviour ourselves. A working model has recently been developed of the potential role of the MNS in emotional, embodied responses to music, called Shared Affective Motion Experience (SAME). According to the SAME model, musical sound is perceived not only in terms of the auditory signal, but also in terms of the intentional sequences of expressive motor acts behind the signal. Thus, even a simple musical listening experience carries within it the presence of human action and human agency, and can facilitate feelings of empathy and social bonding. This chapter elaborates upon and extends the argument in relation to creative, interactive music-therapy. It suggests that the situation of shared music-making is a sophisticated example of the potential of music to express emotion and stimulate empathetic understanding.

Even the most casual follower of developments within social psychology is unlikely to have missed the recent surge of studies adapting the methods of cognitive neuroscience to questions about the nature of human social cognition. With this surge of neuroimaging studies have come novel theoretical contributions to social psychological theory. This chapter reviews three such contributions. The first has been the somewhat unexpected observation that social cognition consistently elicits a distinct pattern of brain activity that distinguishes it from non-social cognition, strongly suggesting that the mental operations giving rise to human social abilities do not simply “piggyback” on general-purpose cognitive processes but instead rely on a set of processes specialized for social thought. Second, recent neuro-imaging work has revitalized a question that, although of central importance to social cognition, has been relatively understudied by social psychologists—namely, what are the mechanisms that allow one person to successfully infer the mental states (thoughts, feelings, motivations) of others? Third, perhaps the most unique contribution made to social psychology by the use of neuroimaging has been the observation that brain regions subserving social cognition appear to have a special status in the brain.

This chapter describes how neuromodulators and electrophysiological phenomena in the hippocampus during NREM and REM sleep affect intracellular signaling pathways that are known to mediate memory consolidation. The hippocampus appears to be a locus for consolidation during sleep, because it is required for the consolidation of spatial learning and contextual fear conditioning and these tasks require sleep for consolidation. During this period of sleep, replay of activity occurs in the hippocampus in oscillations that have the ability to alter synaptic plasticity, perhaps via molecular cascades involved in LTP.

This book examines the role played by brain imaging in cognitive neuroscience by exploring published studies and related literature that compare brain images to cognitive processes. It also discusses whether brain imaging and other recording techniques have any role in providing a solution to the question of how the brain makes the mind. The book discusses two ontological postulates exerting influence on the development of the theory regarding the relationship between the mind and the brain, and emphasizes that no concrete solution to the mind–brain problem is provided by macroscopic brain imaging or any other electrical recording activity. It reports the implications of the ontological postulates for philosophy and neuroscience, and also discusses how these postulates affect the course of scientific psychology. Some conceptual and technical issues such as the attractiveness of brain images, the problem of interpreting and defining the mental process, the paucity of quantification, and indirectness as a measurement of brain activity are also discussed.

How do scientists of human behavior from three different perspectives approach the comparison of two highly publicized athletes of the 2008 Olympics: Shaun Johnson, a female American gymnast who is 5 feet tall, and Yao Ming, a male Chinese basketball player who is 7-foot-6? A typical developmentalist might well focus on the similarities in their physical and neural development, which is at one level of description the same, despite vast differences in gender, ethnicity, and physique. A psychopathologist would, on the other hand, ask what is unique about each of these individuals that sets them apart from one another and the rest of the population. Finally, a cognitive neuroscientist might construct fine-grained cognitive tasks that probe how their different physiques and physiologies are manifest at the level of detailed neurology and behavioral analyses. This work follows each of these three perspectives as they explore the topics of anxiety, depression, autism, dyslexia, and infants at risk.

How do we reconcile our tendencies to think of others as being similar to us with the importance and ease of seeing ourselves as different from others? This chapter adopts a social cognitive neuroscience (SCN) approach to address this issue, using information about the brain to constrain thinking about the psychological processes involved in perceiving people. It reviews neuroimaging research on self-perception, emotion, and social cognition with an eye toward understanding the person perception processes that lead to our dual tendencies to see others as both like and not like ourselves. It reviews neuroimaging research on self-perception, emotion, and social cognition with an eye toward understanding the person perception processes that lead to our dual tendencies to see others as both like and not like ourselves. It differentiates between two modes of processing information about people—one that is a quick, direct, and bottom-up and another that is deliberative, reflective, and top-down. The chapter then examines whether self and other overlap may depend critically on which mode of processing perceivers are engaging.