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The emerging field of action science is characterized by a diversity of theoretical and methodological approaches which share the basic functional belief that evolution has optimized cognitive systems to serve the demands of action. This book brings together the constitutive approaches of action science in a single source, covering the relationship of action to such cognitive functions as perception, attention, memory, and volition. Each chapter, written by a different scientist in the field, offers a tutorial-like description of a major line of inquiry. Considered as one unit, the chapters reflect a rapidly growing field, and provide a forum for comparison and possible integration of approaches. After discussing core questions about how actions are controlled and learned, the book considers ecological approaches to action science; neurocognitive approaches to action understanding and attention; developmental approaches to action science; social actions, including imitation and joint action; and the relationships between action and the conceptual system (grounded cognition) and between volition and action.

Patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) suffer most visibly with such motor deficits as tremor and rigidity and less obviously with a range of nonmotor symptoms, including autonomic dysfunction, mood disorders, and cognitive impairment. The neuropsychiatric disturbances of PD can be as disabling as its motor disorders, but they have only recently begun to be studied intensively by clinicians and scientists. This book examines the major neuropsychiatric syndromes of PD in detail and offers a cognitive theory that accounts for both their neurology and their phenomenology. It offers a review of knowledge of such neuropsychiatric manifestations of PD as cognitive deficits, personality changes, speech and language symptoms, sleep disorders, apathy, psychosis, and dementia. The author argues that the cognitive, mood, and personality symptoms of PD stem from the weakening or suppression of the agentic aspects of the self. The author’s study aims to arrive at a better understanding of the human mind and its breakdown patterns in patients with PD. The human mind-brain is an elaborate and complex structure patched together to produce what we call the self. When we observe the disruption of the self structure, which occurs with the various neuropsychiatric disorders associated with PD, the author argues, we get a glimpse into the inner workings of the most spectacular structure of the self: The agentic self, the self that acts.

The essays in this book, on a range of topics in the cognitive neurosciences, report on the progress in the field over the years and reflect on the many groundbreaking scientific contributions and enduring influence of Michael Gazzaniga, “the godfather of cognitive neuroscience,” founder of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, founding editor of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, and editor of the major reference work, The Cognitive Neurosciences, now in its fourth edition (MIT Press, 2009). The essays, grouped into four sections, which are named after four of Gazzaniga’s books, combine science and a memoir in varying proportions and offer a survey of research in cognitive neuroscience. “The Bisected Brain” examines hemispheric topics pioneered by Gazzaniga at the start of his career; “The Integrated Mind” explores the theme of integration by domination; the wide-ranging essays in “The Social Brain” address subjects from genes to neurons to social conversations and networks; the topics explored in “Mind Matters” include evolutionary biology, methodology, and ethics.

The idea that a specific brain circuit constitutes the emotional brain (and its corollary, that cognition resides elsewhere) shaped thinking about emotion and the brain for many years. Recent behavioral, neuropsychological, neuroanatomy, and neuroimaging research, however, suggests that emotion interacts with cognition in the brain. This book moves beyond the debate over functional specialization, describing the many ways that emotion and cognition interact and are integrated in the brain. The amygdala is often viewed as the quintessential emotional region of the brain, but the book reviews findings revealing that many of its functions contribute to attention and decision making, critical components of cognitive functions. The book counters the idea of a subcortical pathway to the amygdala for affective visual stimuli with an alternate framework, the multiple waves model. Citing research on reward and motivation, the book also proposes the dual competition model, which explains emotional and motivational processing in terms of their influence on competition processes at both perceptual and executive function levels. The book considers the broader issue of structure-function mappings, and examines anatomical features of several regions often associated with emotional processing, highlighting their connectivity properties. The book argues that, as new theoretical frameworks of distributed processing evolve, a truly network view of the brain will emerge, in which “emotion” and “cognition” may be used as labels in the context of certain behaviors, but will not map cleanly into compartmentalized pieces of the brain.

Before this book was published in 1992, conceptual frameworks for brain function were based on the behavior of single neurons, applied globally. This book developed a different conceptual framework, based on large populations of neurons. This was done by showing that patterns of activities among the units in trained artificial neural network models had properties that resembled those recorded from populations of neurons recorded one at a time. It is one of the first books to bring together computational concepts and behavioral data within a neurobiological framework. Aimed at a broad audience of neuroscientists, computer scientists, cognitive scientists, and philosophers, the book is written for both expert and novice. This anniversary edition offers a new preface by the authors that puts the book in the context of current research. This approach influenced a generation of researchers in the field of neuroscience. Even today, when neuroscientists can routinely record from hundreds of neurons using optics rather than electricity, and the 2013 White House BRAIN initiative heralded a new era in innovative neurotechnologies, the main message of this book is still relevant.

Psychiatry is at a crossroads. Faced with challenges of diagnosis and treatment, it must balance analyses at both neurological and psychological levels. Issues of comorbidity, treatment stability, and questions of categorization vs. dimensionality all weigh heavily in current discussions, yet progress has been limited, at best. Computational neuroscience offers a new lens through which to view these issues. This volume presents the results of a unique collaboration between psychiatrists, computational and theoretical neuroscientists, and reveals the synergistic ideas, surprising results, and novel open questions that emerged. It outlines potential approaches to be taken and discusses the implications that these new ideas bring to bear on the challenges faced by neuroscience and psychiatry.

There are many reasons for scholars to investigate empathy. Empathy plays a crucial role in human social interaction at all stages of life; it is thought to help motivate positive social behavior, inhibit aggression, and provide the affective and motivational bases for moral development; it is a necessary component of psychotherapy and patient–physician interactions. This book covers a wide range of topics in empathy theory, research, and applications, helping to integrate perspectives as varied as anthropology and neuroscience. The contributors discuss the evolution of empathy within the mammalian brain and the development of empathy in infants and children; the relationships among empathy, social behavior, compassion, and altruism; the neural underpinnings of empathy; cognitive versus emotional empathy in clinical practice; and the cost of empathy. Taken together, the contributions broaden the interdisciplinary scope of empathy studies, reporting on the knowledge of the evolutionary, social, developmental, cognitive, and neurobiological aspects of empathy and linking this capacity to human communication, including in clinical practice and medical education.

Episodic memory is essential for our day-to-day functions, enabling us to remember where we parked the car, at what time we walked the dog, or what a friend said days ago. This book draws on the developments in neuroscience to present a quantitative model describing the brain mechanisms for encoding and remembering such episodes as “spatiotemporal trajectories.” It reviews physiological breakthroughs on the regions of the brain involved in episodic memory, including the discovery of grid cells, the cellular mechanisms of persistent spiking and resonant frequency, and the topographic coding of space and time. These discoveries inspire a theory for understanding the encoding and retrieval of episodic memory not just as discrete snapshots but as a dynamic replay of spatiotemporal trajectories, allowing us to “retrace our steps” to recover a memory. On the behavioral level, the author emphasizes the capacity to encode and retrieve spatiotemporal trajectories from personal experience, including the time and location of individual events. On the biological level, he focuses on the dynamical properties of neurons and networks in the brain regions mediating episodic memory, addressing the role of neural oscillations and the effect of drugs on episodic memory. In the main text of the book, the author presents the model in narrative form, accessible to scholars and advanced undergraduates in many fields. In the appendix, he presents the material in a more quantitative style, providing mathematical descriptions appropriate for advanced undergraduates and graduate students in neuroscience or engineering.

Our drive to consume—our desire for food, clothing, smart phones, and megahomes—evolved from our ancestors’ drive to survive. But the psychological and neural processes that originally evolved to guide mammals toward resources that are necessary but scarce may mislead us in modern conditions of material abundance. Such phenomena as obesity, financial bubbles, hoarding, and shopping sprees suggest a mismatch between our instinct to consume and our current environment. This volume brings together research from psychology, neuroscience, economics, marketing, animal behavior, and evolution to explore the causes and consequences of consumption. Contributors consider such topics as how animal food-storing informs human consumption; the downside of evolved “fast and frugal” rules for eating; how future discounting and the draw toward immediate rewards influence food consumption, addiction, and our ability to save; overconsumption as social display; and the policy implications of consumption science.Taken together, the chapters make the case for an emerging interdisciplinary science of consumption that reflects commonalities across species, domains, and fields of inquiry. By carefully comparing mechanisms that underlie seemingly disparate outcomes, we can achieve a unified understanding of consumption that could benefit both science and society

Why do people engage in pro and anti-social behaviour? Invisible Mind takes an interdisciplinary approach to address this question, among others, by focussing on the spontaneous psychological ability social cognition, and its inherent flexibility. People get inside the minds—infer the mental states—of others, including non-human agents and animals. Such social cognition is necessary for recognising another as a full human being, deserving of being included in the boundaries of moral protection, encouraging obedience to moral and social rules during social interactions. People can also withhold social cognition from other people, resulting a dehumanized perception, or extend it to non-human agents, resulting anthropomorphism. Harris argues that this flexibility is functional; social cognition evolved when people lived in much smaller groups, suggesting flexibility provided a fitness advantage specific to such a social environment, but may be occasionally maladaptive in modern societies. He reviews social, cognitive, evolutionary, and developmental psychology that supports this claim, before considering the implications of flexible social cognition for economics, legal theories, practice, and policy, international disputes, and athletic competition. He then explores what might be the consequences of flexible social cognition in modern societies where technology facilitates social communication and interaction.

Cognitive neuroscience explores the relationship between our minds and our brains, most recently, by drawing on brain imaging techniques to align neural mechanisms with psychological processes. This book offers a critical review of cognitive neuroscience, examining both its history and modern developments in the field. It pays particular attention to the role of brain imaging—especially functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)—in studying the mind–brain relationship. The author argues that, despite the explosive growth of this new mode of research, there has been more hyperbole than critical analysis of what experimental outcomes really mean. The book attempts a synoptic synthesis of this body of scientific literature. After an introductory discussion, the author turns to his main theme: What neuroscience and psychology have contributed to each other. He considers specific empirical findings in such fields as sensation, perception, emotion and affect, learning and memory, and consciousness. For each field, the author considers psychological and behavioral concerns that can help guide the neuroscientific discussion; work done before the advent of imaging systems; and what brain imaging has brought to recent research. Cognitive neuroscience, he argues, is truly both cognitive and neuroscientific. Both approaches are necessary and neither is sufficient to make sense of the greatest scientific issue of all: How the brain makes the mind.

This volume offers a comprehensive overview of the latest neuroscientific approaches to the scientific study of creativity. In chapters that progress logically from neurobiological fundamentals to systems neuroscience and neuroimaging, leading scholars describe the latest theoretical, genetic, structural, clinical, functional, and applied research on the neural bases of creativity. The treatment is both broad and in depth, offering a range of neuroscientific perspectives with detailed coverage by experts in each area. Following opening chapters that offer theoretical context, the contributors discuss such issues as the heritability of creativity; creativity in patients with brain damage, neurodegenerative conditions, and mental illness; clinical interventions and the relationship between psychopathology and creativity; neuroimaging studies of intelligence and creativity; neuroscientific basis of creativity-enhancing methodologies; and the information-processing challenges of viewing visual art.

Cognitive neuroscientists increasingly claim that brain images generated by new brain imaging technologies reflect, correlate, or represent cognitive processes. This book warns against these claims, arguing that, despite its utility in anatomic and physiological applications, brain imaging research has not provided consistent evidence for correlation with cognition. It bases this argument on a review of the empirical literature, pointing to variability in data not only among subjects within individual experiments but also in the meta-analytical approach that pools data from different experiments. This inconsistency of results, the author argues, has profound implications for the field, suggesting that cognitive neuroscientists have not yet proven their interpretations of the relation between brain activity captured by macroscopic imaging techniques and cognitive processes; what may have appeared to be correlations may have only been illusions of association. The author supports the view that the true correlates are located at a much more microscopic level of analysis—the networks of neurons which make up the brain—and carries out comparisons of the empirical data at several levels of data pooling, including the meta-analytical. The author also argues that although the idea seems straightforward, the task of pooling data from different experiments is extremely complex, leading to uncertain results, and that little is gained by it. The author suggests a need for cognitive neuroscience to re-evaluate the entire enterprise of brain imaging–cognition correlational studies.

Despite major advances in methodology and thousands of published studies every year, treatment outcomes in schizophrenia have not improved over the last fifty years. Moreover, we still lack strategies for prevention and we do not yet understand how the interaction of genetic, developmental, and environmental factors contribute to the disorder. In this volume of the Strungmann Forum Reports Series leading researchers consider conceptual and technical obstacles to progress in understanding schizophrenia and suggest novel strategies for advancing research and treatment.

As adults, we can quickly interpret minimal visual information as a cue that something is animate, as when we briefly catch sight of a mouse darting from hiding place to hiding place. With a mere glance, we can often infer that someone has agency, is moving towards a goal, or is feeling a particular emotion. Recently, there has been renewed interest in the attribution of agency and the understanding of goal-directed behavior, following a rapid increase in empirical discoveries leading to the conclusion that an intuitive understanding of social others is an early-developing part of our human nature, and may be compromised in certain clinical populations, namely autism. This book presents current research in the interdisciplinary field of social perception, including the perception of biological motion, the perception of animacy, attributions of intentionality, and the development of these psychological processes. Authors include researchers who mainly see themselves as vision scientists, those who are developmental psychologists, those who are known for their research in autism, and those who take neuroscientific approaches. The theoretical frameworks and methodological paradigms presented cut across four areas: Developmental Science, Evolutionary Psychology, Neuroscience, and Clinical Approaches.

Many scholars believe that visual mental imagery plays a key role in reasoning. The following chapters in this book argues against this view, proposing that visual images are not relevant for reasoning and can even impede the process. The book also argues against the claim that human thinking is solely based on abstract symbols and is completely embedded in language. The author proposes a third way to think about human reasoning that relies on supramodal spatial layout models, which are more abstract than pictorial images and more concrete than linguistic representations. The author again argues that these spatial layout models are at the heart of human thought, even thought about non-spatial relations in the world. The book also shows that the visual images which we so often associate with reasoning are only in the foreground of conscious experience. Behind the images, the actual logical work is carried out by reasoning-specific operations on these spatial layout models. The book also offers a solution to the problem of indeterminacy in human reasoning, introducing the notion of a preferred layout model, which is one layout model among others that has the best chance of being mentally constructed and thus guides the further process of thought. The author’s “space to reason” theory covers the functional, the algorithmic, and the implementational level of analysis and is corroborated by psychological experiments, functional brain imaging, and computational modeling.