Postle - Essentials of cognitive neuroscience

1. Chapter 12

1. Chapter 01
2. Chapter 02
3. Chapter 03
4. Chapter 04
5. Chapter 05
6. Chapter 06
7. Chapter 07
8. Chapter 08
9. Chapter 09
10. Chapter 10
11. Chapter 11
12. Chapter 12
13. Chapter 13
14. Chapter 14
15. Chapter 15
16. Chapter 16
17. Chapter 17
18. Chapter 18
19. Chapter 19

Bradley R. Postle

This edition first published 2015
2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Postle, Bradley R.
Essentials of cognitive neuroscience / Bradley R. Postle.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-118-46806-7 (pbk.)
1. Cognitive neuroscienceTextbooks.2. Clinical neuropsychologyTextbooks.I. Title.

QP360.P675 2015
612.8233dc23

2014040543

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover image: Images from an experiment in which repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) was delivered to targeted regions of the brain while the subject performed a working memory task. White blobs correspond to elevated activity measured in a previous scan, and the purple dot in each image to the rTMS target. These images were acquired during the study published as Postle, Bradley R., Fabio Ferrarelli, Massihullah Hamidi, Eva Feredoes, Marcello Massimini, Michael Peterson, Andrew Alexander, and Giulio Tononi. 2006. Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Dissociates Working Memory Manipulation from Retention Functions in Prefrontal, but not Posterior Parietal, Cortex. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 18: 17121722.

Does the world need another cognitive neuroscience textbook? Well, need is such a loaded word What Ill try to do here is summarize my motivation for writing this book and, in the process, convey the pedagogical vision behind choices about style, content, and organization.

For over 10 years I have taught cognitive neuroscience to undergraduate students and to graduate students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. For undergraduates I offer an upper-level seminar that is linked to a large-enrollment lecture course on cognitive psychology. The lecture course is a survey of cognitive psychology, spanning sensation and perception to decision making, language, and consciousness. The upper-level seminar course, the impetus for this book, is populated by 1215 honors students who are concurrently enrolled in the lecture course. In the seminar, which meets once per week for 75 minutes, we discuss the cognitive neuroscience of whats been covered in that weeks cognitive psychology lectures. The modal student in this seminar has a background in experimental design and probability and statistics for experimental psychology; only some have any formal training in biology, and fewer still in neuroscience. In this context, I have found that a textbook that attempts to cover everything that we know in the field is not effective it will either be too superficial in its coverage to support substantive discussions in class, or it will be inappropriately lengthy and dense, a cognitive neuroscience analogue of the >1000-page medical-school neuroscience textbook that I lugged around as a graduate student in systems neuroscience. Another approach, which is to assign papers from the primary literature, has proven to be an unsatisfactory alternative, because it results in an inordinate amount of class time being taken up with the remedial work of filling in background that the assigned papers dont cover, and explaining methods so that students can fully understand how the experiments were performed and how their results can be interpreted.

Essentials of Cognitive Neuroscience aspires to be a textbook that will support high-level, substantive engagement with the material in settings where contact hours and/or expectations for outside-of-the-classroom preparation time may be constrained. It introduces 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 its like to be a cognitive neuroscientist: when confronted with a problem, how does one proceed? How does one read and interpret research thats outside of ones 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?

To translate these aspirations into a book, I have made the following pedagogical and organizational choices: