Cognitive neuroscience

edited by Michael D. Rugg, MIT Press, 1997. $45.00 (hbk)/$25.00 (pbk) (xi+373 pages) ISBN 0 262 18181 9 (hbk), ISBN 0 262 68094 7 (pbk).     

Cognitive neuroscience in China

In the last decade, cognitive neuroscience in China has advanced in at least four aspects: first, specialized research institutes and bodies have been set up throughout the nation; second, more and more high‐tech research facilities and approaches have been adopted by domestic researchers; third, international conferences on cognitive neuroscience have been held in Mainland China; and finally, publications relating cognitive processes to neural activation and functioning have increased. This paper selectively reviews research on perception and face recognition, attention, language, memory, and disorders in cognitive brain functions carried out by scientists in Mainland China. For visual perception, some excellent work has been carried out to investigate the neural mechanisms of perceptual priming, perceptual grouping, and perception of global/local properties in compound stimuli. For attention, much work is on issues such as the time course of brain activation in selective attention, the patterns of event‐related potentials in visual and auditory selective attention, and the effect of pre‐cueing on spatial attention. Because the Chinese language has many unique characteristics in phonological and syntactic systems and in the writing system, much research carried out in China takes advantage of these characteristics, trying to separate the universal and language‐specific aspects of language processing and their neural correlates. Memory research is mainly at neuropsychological and neurobiological levels. Disorders of cognitive functioning and their underlying impairments in the brain are attracting more and more attention. The paper concludes that as the Chinese economy is growing fast, more resources will be poured into basic research. Thus, systematic research in various fields of cognitive neuroscience by Chinese scientists is no longer a dream. It is reasonable to expect that research in this field will be accelerated in China and become an important force in the world in the near future.     

Cognitive neuroscience of episodic memory encoding

This paper presents a cognitive neuroscientific perspective on how human episodic memories are formed. Convergent evidence from multiple brain imaging studies using positron emission tomography (PET) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) suggests a role for frontal cortex in episodic memory encoding. Activity levels within frontal cortex can predict episodic memory encoding across a wide range of behavioral manipulations known to influence memory performance, such as those present during levels of processing and divided attention manipulations. Activity levels within specific frontal and medial temporal regions can even predict, on an item by item basis, whether an episodic memory is likely to form. Furthermore, separate frontal regions appear to participate in supplying code-specific information, including distinct regions which process semantic attributes of verbal information as well as right-lateralized regions which process nonverbal information. We hypothesize that activity within these multiple frontal regions provides a functional influence (input) to medical temporal regions that bind the information together into a lasting episodic memory trace.     

Cognitive neuroscience: origins and promise

Both Freud and Wundt had hoped to base psychology on an understanding of the neural basis of mental events. Their efforts were unsuccessful because the structure and function of the human brain was not available for empirical study at the physiological level. Over the last part of this century, there has been amazing growth and vitality in the field of human brain function. In this paper, we trace critical developments in the fields of cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, and brain imaging related to the development of cognitive neuroscience. Cognitive Neuroscience has established that the decomposition of mental events can be united with an understanding of the mental and emotional computations carried out by the human brain. Cognitive neuroscience has the capability of influencing psychology in diverse areas from how children develop to how adults age; from how humans learn to how we imagine; from volitional control to psychopathologies.     

Cognitive and emotional aspects of self-regulation in preschoolers

The goal of the present study was to examine the contribution of executive function (EF) and social cognition to individual differences in emotion regulation (ER) in preschool children. Sixty 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children were administered a battery of EF tasks, two theory of mind tasks, a measure of verbal ability, and an ER task. In addition, parents completed the Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Functioning—Preschool Version (BRIEF-P). Performance on the theory of mind tasks as well as parental ratings of executive function was not related to performance on the ER task. However, a component of EF (i.e., inhibition) approached significance with children's displays of positive behaviors during the ER task. Verbal ability was related to the regulation of positive but not negative emotions. Parental ratings of shifting accounted for a significant amount of variance in parental ratings of ER, even after controlling for verbal ability. The findings are discussed in the context of different conceptualizations of the developmental relation between ER and EF.     

Cognitive neuroscience of aging: contributions of functional neuroimaging

By revealing how brain activity during cognitive performance changes as a function of aging, studies using positron emission tomography (PET) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) are contributing to the development of a new discipline of Cognitive Neuroscience of Aging. This article reviews functional neuroimaging studies of cognitive aging in the domains of visual perception, episodic memory encoding and semantic memory retrieval, episodic memory retrieval, implicit memory, and working memory. The most consistent finding of these studies was that brain activity tends to be less lateralized in older adults than in younger adults. This finding is conceptualized in terms of a model called Hemispheric Asymmetry Reduction in Old Adults (HAROLD). According to a compensation hypothesis, bihemispheric involvement could help counteract age-related neurocognitive decline, whereas, according to a dedifferentiation hypothesis, it reflects a difficulty in recruiting specialized neural mechanisms.     

Cognitive neuroscience: the biology of the mind and findings and current opinion in cognitive neuroscience

Cognitive Neuroscience: The Biology of the Mind by Michael Gazzaniga, Richard Ivry and George Mangun, W.W. Norton, 1998. ￡24.95 (xv+587 pages) ISBN 0 393 97219 4 Findings and Current Opinion in Cognitive Neuroscience by Larry Squire and Stephen Kosslyn, MIT Press, 1998. $35.00 (vii+381 pages) ISBN 0 262 69204 X.     

Children's responses to entry failure: attention deployment patterns and self-regulation skills

In this study the authors investigated associations among children's observed responses to failure in an analogue entry situation, their attention deployment patterns, and skills and processes associated with self-regulation. Participants were 54 kindergarten and first-grade students who were either aggressive-rejected or low aggressive-popular based on peer nominations. Inhibitory control predicted the tendency to respond to entry failure by stopping and watching the group's activity. Baseline vagal tone and other-directed attention predicted children's tendency to change entry strategies after failure. Parent-rated attention skills moderated the relation between children's attention deployment patterns during the entry task and their responses to entry failure. Children who engaged in more other-directed attention were less likely to turn to solitary play after entry failure but only if they had high or moderate levels of attentional control. Other-directed attention was related to repeating previous entry bids without modification after entry failure but only when children had high levels of attention problems.     

Cognitive neuroscience of actions: a whole is greater than the sum of its parts

The purpose of the present issue of Brain and Cognition is to demonstrate that the strength of neuroscience is in its multidisciplinary approach to understand events. Here we are concerned with the domain of action recognition and production. Seven articles have been selected as representative studies of actions carried out in different areas of neuroscience such as neuropsychology, neurophysiology, and cognitive science. Although each addresses different questions within the field, the articles share a common neuroscientific knowledge, as can be readily gathered from the references cited in each article.     

Cognitive neuroscience from a behavioral perspective: A critique of chasing ghosts with geiger counters

Cognitive neuroscience is a growing new discipline concerned with relating complex behavior to neuroanatomy. Relatively new advances in the imaging of brain function, such as positron emission tomography (PET), have generated hundreds of studies that have demonstrated a number of interesting but also potentially problematic brain-behavior relations. For example, cognitive neuroscientists largely favor interpretations of their data that rely on unobserved hypothetical mechanisms. Their reports often contain phraseology such as central executive, willed action, and mental imagery. As B. F. Skinner argued for decades, cognitive constructs of neurological data may yield nothing more than a conceptual nervous system.     

Outsourcing self-regulation

Three studies demonstrate a novel phenomenon--self-regulatory outsourcing--in which thinking about how other people can be instrumental (i.e., helpful) for a given goal undermines motivation to expend effort on that goal. In Experiment 1, participants who thought about how their partner helped them with health goals (as opposed to career goals) planned to spend less time and effort on health goals in the upcoming week. This pattern was stronger for depleted participants than for nondepleted participants. In Experiment 2, participants who thought about how their partner helped them with academic-achievement goals procrastinated more, leaving themselves less time for an academic task, than did participants in two control conditions. This pattern was stronger for participants who were told that procrastinating would drain their resources for the academic task than for participants who were told that procrastinating would not drain their resources for that task. In Experiment 3, participants who decreased their effort after thinking of an instrumental significant other reported higher relationship commitment to that individual than did participants who did not decrease their effort. The possibility for shared (or transactive) self-regulation is discussed.     

Financial self-regulation

Financial self-regulation includes self-regulation strategies. Such strategies—actions and thoughts promoting financial goals over financial temptations—can intervene at multiple points in the self-regulation process. We discuss financial self-regulation strategies in the context of the process model, highlighting empirically studied strategies shown to increase saving or reduce spending. We then discuss factors linked to strategy effectiveness. Although there is no consensus which specific strategy may be superior, there is evidence suggesting that financial strategies employed ahead of a tempting situation (vs. during the situation), self-generated strategies that fit one's personality, and a wider variety of strategies likely result in more self-regulatory success. We also discuss the limits of financial self-regulation strategies and the circumstances under which strategies may be ineffective.     

The dynamics of self-regulation

Research on the dynamics of self-regulation addresses situations in which people select goal-directed actions with respect to other existing or still missing actions towards accomplishing that goal. In such situations people can follow two possible patterns: they can highlight a goal by attending to it more if they have attended to it, or they can balance their goals by attending to a goal more if they have not attended to it. The choice of which pattern to follow depends on the representation of goal actions: when actions signal commitment, people highlight, and when actions signal progress, people balance. We identify several variables that determine whether people follow a dynamic of commitment-induced highlighting or progress-induced balancing. We then discuss the implications of this model for seeking, giving, and responding to feedback.     

Volition as cognitive self-regulation

Living organisms exhibit various levels of self-regulation, the highest of which is man's ability to regulate the operation of his conceptual faculty. Ayn Rand's theory of free will, the basis of this article, identifies this level of self-regulation with volition. The locus of direct volitional choice is placed in the choice “to think or not to think,” where thinking is understood as rational, purposefully directed cognition. The nature of this choice is analyzed in detail, with special emphasis on Rand's concept of mental “focus.” The epistemological status of the theory is discussed, including the role of introspective evidence in its behalf. It is argued that one's volitional control over one's own thinking has the status of an axiom, and that any attempted denial of this control is self-refuting.