Cognitive Neuroscience

The goal of the cognitive neuroscience area is a rigorous understanding of how the human brain supports action, affect, decision making, language, perception, reasoning, social processes, and other aspects of cognition and behavior, including how such processes develop and change in child and adult brains through time.

Training focuses on learning one or more techniques used in cognitive neuroscience and performing extensive empirical research in the student's chosen program of study. Faculty in the cognitive neuroscience area have strong associations with the Imaging Research Facility, which is located in the Psychology building, and sites 3T MRI, 256 channel EEG, TMS, and MR-compatible EEG.

At the present time, the area has the following active research programs:

• Neural mechanisms of multisensory object recognition
• Neural mechanisms of social cognition
• Neural mechanisms of goal-directed behavior
• Neurocognitive mechanisms of psychopathology
• Neural architectures supporting language comprehension and problem-solving
• Computational modeling of functional integration and binding in the cortex
• Adult neural plasticity in cortical and subcortical structures
• Brain-behavior relationships for the interaction of perception and action
• Neural correlates of learning in preschool children
• Neural substrates of multisensory speech
• Development of perception, action, and representation

AREA SPOKESPERSON: Thomas James

AREA FACULTY: Bennet Bertenthal, Joshua Brown, James Craig, Peter Finn, Preston Garraghty, William Hetrick, Karin James, Sharlene Newman, Robert Nosofsky, Brian O'Donnell, David Pisoni, Aina Puce, Olaf Sporns