Discover how the creative brain works across musical, literary, visual artistic, kinesthetic and scientific spheres, and how to study it.

Frontiers in Cognitive Neuroscienceis the first book of extensive readings in an exciting new field that is built on the assumption that "the mind is what the brain does," and that seeks to understand how brain function gives rise to mental activities such as perception, memory, and language. The editors, a cognitive scientist and a neuroscientist, have worked together to select contributions that provide the interdisciplinary foundations of this emerging field, putting them into context, both historically and with regard to current issues. Fifty-five articles are grouped in sections that cover attention, vision, auditory and somatosensory systems, memory, and higher cortical functions. They range from Gazzaniga and Bogen's discussion of functional effects of sectioning the cerebral commissure in man and Geschwind's classic study of the organization of language in the brain, published in the 1960s, to contemporary investigations by Schiller and Logothetis on color-opponent and broad-band channels of the primate visual system and by Bekkers and Stevens on presynaptic mechanisms for long-term potentiation in the hippocampus. The editors have provided both a general introduction and introductions to each of the five major sections. Stephen Kosslyn is Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. Richard Andersen is Professor of Neuroscience and Director of the McDonnell-Pew Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Synthesizing coverage of sensation and reward into a comprehensive systems overview, Neurobiology of Sensation and Reward presents a cutting-edge and multidisciplinary approach to the interplay of sensory and reward processing in the brain. While over the past 70 years these areas have drifted apart, this book makes a case for reuniting sensation a

Could we understand, in biological terms, the unique and fantastic capabilities of the human brain to both create and enjoy art? In the past decade neuroscience has made a huge leap in developing experimental techniques as well as theoretical frameworks for studying emergent properties following the activity of large neuronal networks. These methods, including MEG, fMRI, sophisticated data analysis approaches and behavioral methods, are increasingly being used in many labs worldwide, with the goal to explore brain mechanisms corresponding to the artistic experience. The 37 articles composing this unique Frontiers Research Topic bring together experimental and theoretical research, linking state-of-the-art knowledge about the brain with the phenomena of Art. It covers a broad scope of topics, contributed by world-renowned experts in vision, audition, somato-sensation, movement, and cinema. Importantly, as we felt that a dialog among artists and scientists is essential and fruitful, we invited a few artists to contribute their insights, as well as their art. Joan Miró said that “art is the search for the alphabet of the mind.” This volume reflects the state of the art search to understand neurobiological alphabet of the Arts. We hope that the wide range of articles in this volume will be highly attractive to brain researchers, artists and the community at large.

This book provides an overview of cutting-edge methods currently being used in cognitive psychology, which are likely to appear with increasing frequency in coming years. Once built around univariate parametric statistics, cognitive psychology courses now seem deficient without some contact with methods for signal processing, spatial statistics, and machine learning. There are also important changes in analyses of behavioral data (e.g., hierarchical modeling and Bayesian inference) and there is the obvious change wrought by the advancement of functional imaging. This book begins by discussing the evidence of this rapid change, for example the movement between using traditional analyses of variance to multi-level mixed models, in psycholinguistics. It then goes on to discuss the methods for analyses of physiological measurements, and how these methods provide insights into cognitive processing. New Methods in Cognitive Psychology provides senior undergraduates, graduates and researchers with cutting-edge overviews of new and emerging topics, and the very latest in theory and research for the more established topics.

The primary goal of this volume is to present cutting-edge examples of mining large and naturalistic datasets to discover important principles of cognition and to evaluate theories in a way that would not be possible without such scale. It explores techniques that have been underexploited by cognitive psychologists and explains how big data from numerous sources can inform researchers with different research interests and shed further light on how brain, cognition and behavior are interconnected. The book fills a major gap in the literature and has the potential to rapidly advance knowledge throughout the field. It is essential reading for any cognitive psychology researcher.

This text provides students and researchers with a foundation for examining how brain function gives rise to mental activities such as perception, memory and language. It is grouped into sections that cover attention, vision, auditory and somatosensory systems, memory and higher cortical.

Language is one of our most precious and uniquely human capacities, so it is not surprising that research on its neural substrates has been advancing quite rapidly in recent years. Until now, however, there has not been a single introductory textbook that focuses specifically on this topic. Cognitive Neuroscience of Language fills that gap by providing an up-to-date, wide-ranging, and pedagogically practical survey of the most important developments in the field. It guides students through all of the major areas of investigation, beginning with fundamental aspects of brain structure and function, and then proceeding to cover aphasia syndromes, the perception and production of speech, the processing of language in written and signed modalities, the meanings of words, and the formulation and comprehension of complex expressions, including grammatically inflected words, complete sentences, and entire stories. Drawing heavily on prominent theoretical models, the core chapters illustrate how such frameworks are supported, and sometimes challenged, by experiments employing diverse brain mapping techniques. Although much of the content is inherently challenging and intended primarily for graduate or upper-level undergraduate students, it requires no previous knowledge of either neuroscience or linguistics, defining technical terms and explaining important principles from both disciplines along the way.

In security science, efficient operation depends typically on the interaction between technology, human and machine detection and human and machine decision making. A perfect example of this interplay is ‘gatekeeping’, which is aimed to prevent the passage of people and objects that represent known threats from one end to the other end of an access point. Gatekeeping is most often achieved via visual inspections, mass screening, random sample probing and/or more targeted controls on attempted passages at points of entry. Points of entry may be physical (e.g. national borders) or virtual (e.g. connection log-ons). Who and what are defined as security threats and the resources available to gatekeepers determine the type of checks and technologies that are put in place to ensure appropriate access control. More often than not, the net performance of technology-aided screening and authentication systems ultimately depends on the characteristics of human operators. Assessing cognitive, affective, behavioural, perceptual and brain processes that may affect gatekeepers while undertaking this task is fundamental. On the other hand, assessing the same processes in those individuals who try to breach access to secure systems (e.g. hackers), and try to cheat controls (e.g. smugglers) is equally fundamental and challenging. From a security standpoint it is vital to be able to anticipate, focus on and correctly interpret the signals connected with such attempts to breach access and/or elude controls, in order to be proactive and to enact appropriate responses. Knowing cognitive, behavioral, social and neural constraints that may affect the security enterprise will undoubtedly result in a more effective deployment of existing human and technological resources. Studying how inter-observer variability, human factors and biology may affect the security agenda, and the usability of existing security technologies, is of great economic and policy interest. In addition, brain sciences may suggest the possibility of novel methods of surveillance and intelligence gathering. This is just one example of a typical security issue that may be fruitfully tackled from a neuroscientific and interdisciplinary perspective. The objective of our Research Topic was to document across relevant disciplines some of the most recent developments, ideas, methods and empirical findings that have the potential to expand our knowledge of the human factors involved in the security process. To this end we welcomed empirical contributions using different methodologies such as those applied in human cognitive neuroscience, biometrics and ethology. We also accepted original theoretical contributions, in the form of review articles, perspectives or opinion papers on this topic. The submissions brought together researchers from different backgrounds to discuss topics which have scientific, applicative and social relevance.

Perseverative cognition is defined as the repetitive or sustained activation of cognitive representations of past stressful events or feared events in the future and even at non-clinical levels it causes a “fight-or-flight” action tendency, followed by a cascade of biological events, starting in the brain and ending as peripheral stress responses. In the past decade, such persistent physiological activation has proven to impact individuals’ health, potentially leading to somatic disease. As such, perseverative cognition has recently been proposed as the missing piece in the relationships between stress, psychopathology, and risk for health. Perseverative cognition is indeed a hallmark of conditions such as anxiety and mood disorders that are at increased -though still unexplained- cardiovascular risk. Although the pivotal role of ruminative and worrisome thoughts in determining the onset and maintenance of psychopathological disorders has been acknowledged for a long time, its effects on the body via reciprocal influences between mental processes and the body's physiology have been neglected. Moreover, perseverative cognition is definitely not restricted to psychopathology, it is extremely common and likely even omnipresent, pervading daily life. The objective of the Research Topic is to provide an interdisciplinary examination of cutting-edge neuroscientific research on brain-body signatures of perseverative cognition in both healthy and psychopathological individuals. Despite the evident role of the brain in repetitive thinking and the assumption that our mind is embodied, bran-body pathways from perseverative cognition to health risk have remained largely unexplored.