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Neuroscience is the scientific study of the nervous system. As a branch of science, neuroscience covers the fields of anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, or molecular biology of nerves and nervous tissue. Cognitive neuroscience spans over and overlaps many disciplines such as neuroscience, physiological psychology, cognitive psychology, and neuropsychology.
Cognitive neuroscience aims to find the causal relationship between neural circuits in the brain and their corresponding psychological or cognitive functions. The use of neuroimaging functional tools (e.g., fMRI) enables the examination of brain mechanisms and brain activations while the subject performs mental tasks. In order to identify the brain area activated by a specific mental task, researchers have studied different research topics such as consciousness, cognition, memory, attention, emotion, decision making and others.
Basics of Cognitive Neuroscience
The human brain contains about one hundred billion (1011) neurons and 100 trillion (1014) synapses, making it the most complex organ in human body. There are two major brain systems that control and influence our daily behaviors, namely the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and the limbic system. The prefrontal cortex is the brain’s outer layer (cerebral cortex) that covers the front part of the prefrontal lobe. It is associated with higher cognitive processing such as reasoning, planning, problem solving, decision-making, and movements. The limbic system deals mainly with emotions and memories. Specific brain areas and their subdivisions are responsible for different behaviors. Table 1 summarizes the existing understanding of different parts of the brain and their associated cognitive behaviors.
Table 1. Brain systems and responsive cognitive behaviors
| Brain system and functions | Key area | Cognitive behaviors |
Prefrontal cortex
- Problem solving
- Personality expression
- Calculation
- Short-term memory
- Moderating acceptable behavior
- Decision making | Dorsal prefrontal cortex | Attention, cognition and action (Goldman, Rokic, 1988)
Working memory (Braver et al., 1997; Cohen et al., 1997)
Cognitive effort (Owen et al., 2005; Van der Linden et al., 2003) |
| Ventral prefrontal cortex | Emotion (Price, 1999) |
| Medial prefrontal cortex | Slow-wave sleep (SWS) (Mander et al., 2013) |
Limbic System
- Emotion
- Behavior
- Motivation
- Long-term memory
- Olfaction | Hypothalamus | Motivation, emotion, learning, and memory |
| Hippocampus | - Spatial memory (Kheirbeck & Hen, 2011)
- Learning (CurlikShors & Shors, 2012) |
| Amygdala | - Episodic-autobiographical memory (EAM) networks (Markowitsch & Staniloiu, 2011)
- Attention and emotional process, social processing |