Introduction to Cognitive Neuroscience

This chapter discusses the cognitive neuroscience. It provides an overview, charting how different disciplines and methods combined to illuminate how the brain gives rise to mind and cognition. Cognitive neuroscience is an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the neural bases of cognition and behavior. Although cognitive neuroscience, by that name, only emerged in the late 1970s, it draws from a number of fields, including cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, the multiple disciplines of neuroscience, and computational approaches. Finally, computational approaches have been central to advancing theoretical and empirical developments in cognitive neuroscience. Realistic modeling of single cells and small networks has contributed to our understanding of, for example, neural plasticity and attention. Connectionism has provided ways to model large-scale distributed representations and aspects of dynamics. Cognitive neuroscience emerged after the cognitive revolution in psychology, and in particular after cognitive science had already achieved some recognition as an interdisciplinary approach to understanding mind and cognition.