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This book charts a neuroscientist's journey to understand the central mysteries of consciousness. The author began his career in the neurophysiology of vision in the 1980s, just when the field was coming into focus with the advent of new computing and imaging technologies. As a pioneer in the technique of mesoscopic imaging, he worked with some of the giants in vision science: Torsten Wiesel, Francis Crick, Tom Albright, and many others. This book shows how science is built on such relationships. Along the way, the book gives a vivid sense of the abundant passion and creativity that drive scientists in their pursuit of understanding.

The concept of apraxia was shaped by the German psychiatrist Hugo Liepmann some 100 years ago. He suggested that fibers connecting posterior brain regions to the motor cortex are the anatomical substrate of the conversion of multimodal mental images of intended actions into motor commands. Liepmann’s ideas fell into disgrace during the middle of the twentieth century but were resuscitated in its last third and became dominant for modern research. Alternative approaches agreed with Liepmann in the distinction between high and low levels of motor commands. The book discusses manifestations and aspects of apraxia with an emphasis on the high versus low level of control which is conceptualized as a distinction between cognitive and motor aspects of action control. It concludes that the cognitive nature of apraxia comes to the fore most clearly in three manifestations of apraxia that are exclusively bound to left-hemisphere damage: imitation of meaningless hand postures, use of single mechanical tools, and pantomime of tool use. Their functional communality is a central role for segmentation and combination. For imitation, visual features of the demonstrated gesture are segmented into distinct body parts which are combined for reproducing the posture. For tool use the structures of tool and recipient are segmented into functionally significant traits which are combined to form mechanical chains, and for pantomime the compound image of hand, action, and object is segmented into distinctive features of the object and the acting hand which are combined to form a comprehensible image of the object and its use.

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”.

The book considers the nature of the bilingual brain by framing it around three specific issues: age of acquisition, language proficiency and cognitive control. To achieve this the book is divided into three separate sections that consist of two chapters each. The first chapter considers of each section considers the issues within the monolingual and nonverbal cognitive literature. The second applies these basic principles to the bilingual literature. Work across cognitive psychology and neuroscience are used to bolster the main arguments. An introduction and conclusion serve to frame the discussion and to finalize it, respectively. Hernandez ends by suggesting that bilingualism is best understood within a model that takes into account principles from neuroscience and cognitive psychology when considering the learning of two languages.

Many decisions in the legal system and elsewhere depend on predictions of bad behaviors, including crimes and mental illnesses. Some scientists have suggested recently that these predictions can become more accurate and useful if they are based in part on biological information, such as brain structure and function, genes, and hormones. The prospect of such bioprediction, however, raises serious concerns about errors and injustice. Can biological information significantly increase the accuracy of predictions of bad behavior? Will innocent or harmless people be mistakenly treated as if they were guilty or dangerous? Is it fair to keep people in prisons or mental institutions longer because of their biology? Will these new instruments of bioprediction be abused in practice within current institutions? Is bioprediction worth the cost? Do we want our government to use biology in this way? All of these scientific, legal, and ethical questions are discussed in this volume.

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.

Magnetic resonance imaging methods, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS), have taken a commanding position in brain studies because they allow scientists to follow brain activities in the living human. The ability to measure cerebral anatomy, neuronal firing, and brain metabolism has extended and reinvigorated hopes of understanding the role that brain activity plays in human life. Neuroscientists, measuring brain energies and work by imaging methods, have consciously or unconsciously been incorporating philosophical views into the planning and interpretations of these experiments. This book assumes that behavior is a property only of the person; that the person, not the brain, remembers, intends, or decides. The brain’s role is to help the person perform these actions just as the muscle helps him to lift heavy objects and the liver maintains chemical homeostasis. Origins of the brain’s role in neuroscience are explored in a selective history of relevant philosophies and by examples of successful interdisciplinary experiments. Neuroimaging experiments that relate brain activities to observables, including human behavior, are herein valued above those that conduct futile searches for the neuronal basis of mental processes. In accord with the emphasis on observable behavior, neuroimaging results responsible for two different forms of conscious behavior have been identified and the means of studying them described.

It has been 10 years since the first edition of “The Handbook of the Cognitive Neuroscience of Aging: was published. The field was in its infancy at that time, and has matured rapidly, as a reading of the present volume will quickly establish. The original chapters often laid out an agenda for directions for future research, and it is quite gratifying to note that the present chapters reflect advances in methodology, basic processes, and health that were called for in the earlier volume. A brief summary of the major contribution to the discipline of each chapter is presented.

The purpose of this book is to explore the neurobiology and psychobiology underlying puberty and adolescence. It tells the story of how contemporary neuroscience has come to make significant contributions to the understanding of a developmental period that used to be the sole purview of developmental psychologists and pediatric endocrinologists. The authors presume the reader will have a general understanding of the basic principles of neuroscience and psychology and have written this book to serve as an appropriate text for an upper-level undergraduate seminar or graduate course designed to probe puberty and adolescence more deeply from a psychobiological perspective. Topics covered in specific chapters include timing and regulation of reproductive maturation (puberty), mechanisms of adolescent brain development in laboratory animals and humans, neural underpinnings of higher risk-taking and impulsive behavior in adolescents, hormonal programming of social behaviors during adolescence, and effects of stress and drugs on the adolescent brain. The book ends with the authors’ perspective on some of the big questions about the adolescent brain and behavior that remain to be answered.

Decision making cuts across most areas of intellectual enquiry and academic endeavor. The classical view of individual human thinkers choosing among options remains important and instructive, but the contributors to this volume broaden this perspective to characterize the decision making behavior of groups, non-human organisms and even non-living objects and mathematical constructs. A diverse array of methods is brought to bear—mathematical, computational, subjective, neurobiological, evolutionary, and cultural. We can often identify best or optimal decisions and decision making processes, but observed responses may deviate markedly from these, to a large extent because the environment in which decisions must be made is constantly changing. Moreover, decision making can be highly constrained by institutions, natural and social context, and capabilities. Studies of the mechanisms underlying decisions by humans and other organisms are just beginning to gain traction and shape our thinking. Though decision making has fundamental similarities across the diverse array of entities considered to be making them, there are large differences of degree (if not kind) that relate to the question of human uniqueness. From this survey of views and approaches, we converge on a tentative agenda for accelerating development of a new field that includes advancing the dialog between the sciences and the humanities, developing a defensible classification scheme for decision making and decision makers, addressing the role of morality and justice, and moving advances into applications—the rapidly developing field of decision support.

For most native English speakers, the meanings of words like “blue,” “cup,” “stumble,” and “carve” seem quite natural. Research in semantic typology has shown, however, that they are far from universal. Although the roughly 6,500 languages around the world have many similarities in the sorts of concepts they encode, they also vary greatly in how they partition particular conceptual domains, how they map those domains onto syntactic categories, which distinctions they force speakers to habitually track, and how deeply they weave certain notions into the fabric of their grammar. Although these insights from semantic typology have had a major impact on psycholinguistics, they have mostly been neglected by the branch of cognitive neuroscience that studies how concepts are represented, organized, and processed in the brain. In this book, David Kemmerer exposes this oversight and demonstrates its significance. He argues that as research on the neural substrates of semantic knowledge moves forward, it should expand its purview to embrace the broad spectrum of cross-linguistic variation in the lexical and grammatical representation of meaning. Otherwise, it will never be able to achieve a truly comprehensive, pan-human account of the cortical underpinnings of concepts. The book begins by elaborating the different perspectives on concepts that currently exist in semantic typology and cognitive neuroscience. Then it shows how a synthesis of these approaches can lead to a more unified understanding of several domains of meaning—specifically, objects, actions, and spatial relations. Finally, it explores multiple issues involving the interplay between language, cognition, and consciousness.

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.

Cultural models are defined as molar organizations of knowledge. Their internal structure consists of a core component and peripheral nodes that are filled by default values. These values are instantiated, that is changed to specific values or left at their default values, when the individual experiences events of any type. Thus, the possibility arises for recognizing and categorizing events as representative of the same cultural model even if they slightly differ in each of their specific occurrences. Cultural models play an important role in the generation of the individual’s behavior. A proposal is advanced to consider cultural models as fundamental units of analysis for an approach to culture that goes beyond the dichotomy between the individual (culture only in mind) and the collective (culture only in the social realm). The genesis of the concept of cultural model is traced from Kant to contemporary scholars. The concept underwent a number of transformations while it crossed and received further and unique elaborations within disciplines like philosophy, psychology, anthropology, sociology, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science. A methodological trajectory is outlined that blends qualitative and quantitative techniques. A survey follows of the extensive research about cultural models carried out all over the world. The results of the survey generated the proposal of an empirically motivated typology of cultural models rooted in the primary difference between foundational and molar types. The book closes with a suggestion of a number of avenues for future research.

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.

This book provides a qualitative overview (using graphical and classical meta-analysis) of the vast literature on aging and speeded tasks—bringing together, almost everything we know about age and processing speed. The book investigates age-related slowing in elementary tasks (including updated parameters for the Aging Human Information Processor) and tasks of executive control (inhibition, task shifting, and task coordination). It examines broader regularities in the age-related effects of these tasks that might hint at underlying brain-related mechanisms, while keeping out a keen eye for alternative explanations (such as increased caution with age). It models the course of speed-of-processing over the lifespan and investigates the influence of generational differences on mental speed. Finally, it examines the influence of age-related mental slowing on other aspects of cognition (working memory, executive control episodic memory, aspects of fluid intelligence), and provides the first systematic review of age-speed-cognition mediation in a longitudinal context.

This book presents a new neurocognitive theory of dreams that documents the similarities of dreaming to waking thought, demonstrates that personal psychological meaning can be found in a majority of dream reports, has a strong developmental dimension based on excellent longitudinal and cross-sectional studies carried out in sleep labs with children ages 3–15, locates the neural substrate for dreaming in the same brain network active during mind-wandering and daydreaming, and marshals the evidence that shows it is very unlikely that dreaming has any adaptive function. These claims are based on five different sets of descriptive empirical findings that were developed between the late 1950s and the first sixteen years of the twenty-first century. All of these findings were unanticipated by scientific dream researchers and then resisted to varying degrees by dream theorists for a variety of reasons. The first five chapters spell out the theory and the evidence for it without any discussion or criticism of past theories. The next two chapters present detailed criticisms of two major alternative theories. The penultimate chapter presents evidence that it is very unlikely that dreaming has any adaptive function in the evolutionary sense of the term, although humans have invented uses for dreams in religious and healing rituals. In that regard, dreaming has an emergent function in culture that was invented in the course of history due to human cognitive capacities. The final chapter presents a general agenda for future research using new methodologies to test all of the neurocognitive hypotheses.