Essentials of Cognitive Neuroscience

In-depth exploration of the core neurobiological, psychological, and computational principles that underlie how the brain gives rise to the mind

Essentials of Cognitive Neuroscience provides a broad and substantive foundation with which the reader can understand how the brain gives rise to the mind, spanning topics as varied as how we can pick out a familiar face in a crowd, send a text message while walking down the street, recall what we ate for dinner last Saturday, and be consciously aware of reading words on a page. Each chapter begins with an overview of foundational principles before transitioning to in-depth exploration of how today’s scientists use state-of-the-art methods to advance our knowledge and understanding of the neural bases of human thought and behavior.

New in this third edition is an overview of theoretical frameworks and computational approaches needed to understand the latest developments in this rapidly evolving field, including: predictive coding; dynamical systems theory; reinforcement learning; recurrent neural network modeling; representational similarity analysis; diffusion-decision modeling; and representational geometry analysis.

Essentials of Cognitive Neuroscience includes information on:

• High-level cognition, covering cognitive control, decision making, social behavior, emotion, language, and consciousness
• Memory and mental representation, covering visual object recognition and knowledge, neural bases of plasticity, declarative and semantic long-term memory, and working memory
• Perception, attention, and action, covering the visual, auditory, and somatosensory systems, spatial cognition, skeletomotor and oculomotor control, and the control of attention
• Principles of the organization, structure, and functions of the brain, and strategies for relating these to thought and behavior

Written in a narrative style that gives the reader a sense of what it's like to be a cognitive neuroscientist, Essentials of Cognitive Neuroscience is a vital learning resource for students interested in psychology, neuroscience, and neurology.