Su At Kiply

Name: Su At Kiply

NIM: 16410235

Introduction of Cognitive Neuroscience

What is Cognitive Neuroscience?

In general, Cognitive Neuroscience is the study of the neural substrates of cognitive. Cognition is broadly defined, so it includes memory, perception, attention, emotion, language, executive function, and decision making. The study of how we think at multiple different level, so our mental processes are really driven by what happening in the brain. In order to understand those mental processes at that level, we have to study what is going on in the brain. So it combining psychology and then psychological theories with what actually happening in the physiological process that going on in the brain. All complex psychological phenomena are really happening within the brain and can be understanding of what happening at a psychological level, can be enhanced or constrained by what happening in the brain. And then it also of course has many applications to mental illness as well, so here is really focusing on understanding mental processes in normal functioning brains but there is also application to what goes wrong, if you understand what happening in the normal function, you can also understand what is going on in the brain.

History of Cognitive Neuroscience

There is the long history of cognitive neuroscience. There is a large influence ancient philosophy on the development of cognitive neuroscience. There is sort of basic ideas that have come from philosophers. Here I would like to mention a few, but there is a lot of philosophers of mind and philosophers of science. These ideas about thinking about mental function will come from ancient philosophy, so fundamental questions about the nature of the mind. For example, the idea of Tabula Rasa (385-322) from Aristotle, or Cogito Ergo Sum (1595-1650). There are sorts of the people were full ancient philosophers are even talking about theorizing, about how the mind works. These ancient times where people were really starting to think of what going on, what causing us to think and behave the way we do.

Behaviorism (John Watson) was a very prevalent area that people started getting into psychology at this time, and really focused on learning. They said there is sort of nothing innate, everything that all your behaviors and all thoughts are learned through out your life time. Their goals are really to predict and control behavior through different type to learning and then they really were not concerned with the how it happening in between

Current State/Major Questions in Cognitive Neuroscience

Study domains such us:

Perception: people study about how do we process information and perceive through our sensory systems.

Attention: many type of different attention research but one of the areas is looking at selective attention and our ability to really focus on attention one thing.

Memory: it involved sort of everything, any leaning is memory, and it is involved in kind of all area of cognition.

Emotion: there is sort of basic emotional facial expressions that are consistent across cultures which indicates again that is maybe ancient process. In cognitive neuroscience also want to understand what/how emotion develops sort of what its purpose and how it affects.

Language: people are looking at what areas of the brain process language information, how that develops over the course of your life, how you learn process different language.

Execution function: understanding how the prefrontal cortex guides, how you remember information.

Decision making: a lot of this area research if focusing on how we make decision in certain type of contact specifically looking at reward.

Method in Cognitive Neuroscience

          There are lots of methods that use in cognitive Neuroscience research, for example Behavioral methods, Localizing brain function, Brain perturbation methods, and Measuring neural activity.