Description
Book SynopsisEssentials of Cognitive Neuroscience ntroduces and explicates key principles and concepts in cognitive neuroscience in such a way that the reader will be equipped to critically evaluate the ever-growing body of findings that the field is generating. For some students this knowledge will be needed for subsequent formal study, and for all readers it will be needed to evaluate and interpret reports about cognitive neuroscience research that make their way daily into the news media and popular culture. The book seeks to do so in a style that will give the student a sense of what it''s like to be a cognitive neuroscientist: when confronted with a problem, how does one proceed? How does one read and interpret research that''s outside of one''s sub-area of specialization? How do two scientists advancing mutually incompatible models interrelate? Most importantly, what does it feel like to partake in the wonder and excitement of this most dynamic and fundamental of sciences?
Table of ContentsPreface
Acknowledgments
Methodology Boxes
Walkthrough of Pedagogical Features
Companion Website
Section I: The Neurobiology of Thinking
1 Introduction and History
2 The Brain
Section II: Sensation, Perception, Attention, and Action
3 Methods for Cognitive Neuroscience
4 Sensation and Perception of Visual Signals
5 Audition and Somatosensation
6 The Visual System
7 Spatial Cognition and Attention
8 Skeletomotor Control
9 Oculomotor Control and the Control of Attention
Section III: Mental Representation
10 Visual Object Recognition and Knowledge
11 Neural Bases of Memory
12 Declarative Long-Term Memory
13 Semantic Long-Term Memory
14 Working Memory
Section IV: High-Level Cognition
15 Cognitive Control
16 Decision-Making
17 Social Behavior
18 Emotion
19 Language
20 Consciousness
Glossary 562
Index 571
