The field of neuroimaging has reached a watershed. Brain imaging research has been the source of many advances in cognitive neuroscience and cognitive science over the last decade, but recent critiques and emerging trends have been raising foundational issues of methodology, measurement, and theory. Concerns over interpretation of brain maps have created serious controversies in social neuroscience, and, more importantly, point to a larger set of issues that lie at the heart of the entire brain mapping enterprise. In this book, neuroimagers and philosophers of the mind reexamine these central ... More

The field of neuroimaging has reached a watershed. Brain imaging research has been the source of many advances in cognitive neuroscience and cognitive science over the last decade, but recent critiques and emerging trends have been raising foundational issues of methodology, measurement, and theory. Concerns over interpretation of brain maps have created serious controversies in social neuroscience, and, more importantly, point to a larger set of issues that lie at the heart of the entire brain mapping enterprise. In this book, neuroimagers and philosophers of the mind reexamine these central issues and explore current controversies that have arisen in cognitive science, cognitive neuroscience, computer science, and signal processing. The contributors address both the statistical and dynamic analysis and modeling of neuroimaging data and interpretation, discussing localization, modularity, and the neuroimagers’ tacit assumptions about how these two phenomena are related; controversies over the correlation of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data and social attributions (characterized for good or bad as “voodoo correlations”); and the standard inferential design approach in neuroimaging. Finally, they take a more philosophical approach, considering the nature of measurement in brain imaging, and offer a framework for novel neuroimaging data structures (effective and functional connectivity—“graphs”).