Cognitive neuroscience - Definition and Overview

Cognitive neuroscience is a branch of neuroscience involving the study of the neural mechanisms of cognition or put simply: "how the brain thinks".

Cognitive neuroscience overlaps with cognitive psychology, but whereas psychologists seek to understand the mind, cognitive neuroscience is concerned with understanding how the mental processes take place in the brain. The two areas have a great deal in common since:

• an understanding of mental structure can inform theories about brain functions
• knowledge about neural mechanisms are useful in understanding mental structure

Methods include cognitive psychology, functional neuroimaging, neuropsychology and behavioral neuroscience. Cognitive neuroscience also makes contact with low-level data from electrophysiological studies of neural systems and, increasingly, genetic analyses. The main theoretical approach is computational neuroscience, but more "abstract" information processing approaches derived from cognitive psychology and neuropsychology remain influential.

Cognitive neuroscience is sometimes seen as part of a wider interdisciplinary study of cognition: cognitive science.

References

• Gazzaniga, M. S., Ed. (1999). Conversations in the Cognitive Nerosciences. New York, The MIT Press.

See also

• Important publications in cognitive neuroscience