Cognitive Neuroscience Lecture 1: Introduction

'''This page is the goal for lecture pages. Separated into meaningful sections for content and hyperlinked to pages in the wiki where students can read more if they choose, but this page autonomous if students want only to study for class.'''

Cognitive Neuroscience Basic Vocabulary
Cognition—variety of higher mental processes (thinking, perceiving, imagining, speaking, acting, planning)

Neuroscience—biological investigation of the brain and nervous system

Cognitive Neuroscience—cogsci/cogpsych + bio/neuro

-         how brain produces thoughts, ideas, & related mental phenomena

How does the brain enable the mind?

-         Brain & behavior

-         How complex cognitive/affective behavior is mediated by the brain

-         Multidisciplinary:

o Diverse tools & methods

o Scientists from various bg

One theory of how brain enables mind is behaviorism

Behaviorism—explain brain by associations we learn between stimuli & behavior; the brain provides associative links

-         Skinner box: learn to choose the color or do other action (stim) that gives reward

-         Stimà black box à response

-          *Watson & Skinner*

Boundary extension—phenomenon where we think we saw past the borders of what we really saw

Cognitivism—in contrast to behaviorism, brain is information processing system

-         Info processing depends on internal representations of info and cognitive operations (functions) that carry out info transformation (perception, thought, behavior)

-         Which regions map onto which functions?

-         Instantiates multiple cognitive operations that mediate between I/O

-         Tries to answer what’s in the black box: organism has a map of info in its head

Computational theory of mind & brain—everything your mind & brain does (learn, perceive, etc) is a result of or is a form of info processing

-         Energy carries info about world

-         Sensors capture/transduce that info

-         Complex series of processors crunch data

-         Other processors generate output (eg movement)

-         All cognition is the product of your brain state, which is the product of information processing (computation)

Mind Reading

-         Can you reconstruct what a viewer is seeing from brain imaging data?

-         Use non-invasive fMRI to record during trailers

-         Build ‘dictionary’ to match activity during certain stim (shapes, edges, motion)

-         record for new trailer

-         match new brain activity to dictionary to find corresponding clips

-         average these clips together for reconstruction

-         Decoding: give a program many voxel/brain scan inputs, and form a database. Then it can predict what a new object is by giving it a new voxel/brain scan input

‘Decoding’ the Brain
-         Decode orientation, motion, direction, color, Object perception, Episodic memory, Motor planning: which direction are you about to move

-         Have subjects in scanner and record waves

-         Feed waves to database/dictionary and see what imagery it predicts

-         Ask what they sawà build a dictionary of stim mentioned

-         See if dictionary fMRI match dream fMRI

Neuroscience in the courtroom
-         Brain electrical oscillations signature test for experiential knowledge

-         Not always credited

-         No lie MRI goes straight to CNS instead of PNS like polygraph

-         Jurors give more weight to fMRI than polygraph or thermal facial imaging

Brain-machine interface—EEG headset

-         Direct control of external device through brain activity by thinking