Cognitive Neuroscience Lecture 1: Introduction

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## 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