Introduction to Cognitive Neuroscience

Comprehensive practice flashcards defining core vocabulary, anatomical regions, neuroimaging methods, clinical syndromes, and experimental paradigms in cognitive neuroscience.

Cognitive neuroscience

The scientific discipline that aims to understand how neural systems support mental processes by integrating cognitive tasks, behaviour, and neural evidence.

Three levels of explanation

The framework linking the behavioural level (what a person can do: accuracy, reaction time, errors),

the cognitive level (what operations are required: attention, representations, retrieval)

the neural level (what mechanisms support them: regions, circuits, dynamics).

Blood Oxygen Level Dependent (BOLD) signal

A haemodynamic signal measured by fMRI that reflects changes in blood oxygenation related to neural activity rather than directly measuring neural firing.

Reverse inference

The logical error of inferring the occurrence of a specific cognitive process solely from the observation of activation in a particular brain region.

Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS)

A non-invasive method that delivers magnetic pulses over an accessible cortical area to transiently perturb neural processing and establish causal contributions to behaviour.

Orbitofrontal Cortex (OFC)

A prefrontal region comprising Brodmann areas 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, and 47 that integrates sensory information for stimulus-reward associations and regulates responses to reward and punishment.

Iowa Gambling Task

A decision-making paradigm used to evaluate reward processing and sensitivity to long-term penalties versus short-term gains, frequently impaired after orbitofrontal cortex damage.

Phineas Gage 1848

railroad foreman who sustained severe bilateral frontal injury from tamping iron , surviving intellectual faculties alongside profound deficits in social inhibition and emotional balance.

Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex (DLPFC)

prefrontal cortical region

containing Brodmann areas 8, 9, and 46 (and part of 10)

supports executive functions, goal-directed planning, and working memory manipulation.

Pathological perseveration

abnormal repetition of a previously learned behavioural response despite environment indicating no longer correct

commonly seen following DLPFC lesions.

Patient H.M. 1953

underwent bilateral medial temporal resection

resulting in severe anterograde episodic memory loss while leaving immediate memory span and procedural motor learning intact.

Broca's area

region in the left inferior frontal gyrus (Brodmann areas 44 and 45)

critical for the vocalisation, motor programming, and expressive production of speech.

Expressive aphasia

A language disorder caused by lesions in left Brodmann areas 44 and 45 (Broca's area), characterized by non-fluent, effortful speech output alongside relatively preserved auditory comprehension.

Wernicke's area

language area

posterior superior temporal gyrus (Brodmann area 22) of left hemisphere

specialized for speech comprehension.

Receptive aphasia

disorder resulting from damage to Wernicke's area (Brodmann area 22)

severe difficulties comprehending spoken and written language.

Arcuate fasciculus

prominent white matter fibre bundle inside the brain that connects Broca's area to Wernicke's area

Conduction aphasia

language impairment

damage to the arcuate fasciculus

intact comprehension & fluent speech production

deficits in speech repetition.

Ventral visual stream

multicentric cortical pathway coursing from striate and prestriate cortex to the inferior temporal cortex (Brodmann areas 20 and 37)

enables the visual identification of objects ('what' pathway).

Dorsal visual stream

multicentric cortical pathway from striate and prestriate cortex to the posterior parietal cortex (Brodmann areas 5 and 7)

allows the visual spatial localisation of objects ('where' pathway).

Double dissociation

Patient A shows impairment on Task 1 with sparing on Task 2

Patient B exhibits sparing on Task 1 with impairment on Task 2,

separate cognitive and neural systems.

Apperceptive visual agnosia

patients cannot integrate basic sensory features into structured patterns or shapes

leading to piecemeal perception associated with posterior parietal cortex damage.

Associative visual agnosia

visual deficit in which an individual can accurately perceive and copy visual figures but cannot link the intact percept to semantic knowledge or verbally identify the object.

Hemispatial neglect

neurological syndrome typically caused by lesions to the right posterior parietal cortex where patients ignore the contralesional left visual field without awareness of the deficit.

Fusiform Face Area (FFA)

specialized region within the fusiform gyrus of the inferior temporal cortex selectively responsive to faces, damage to which produces acquired prosopagnosia.

N170

An event-related potential (ERP) component peaking approximately 170 ms post-stimulus at posterior temporal sites (e.g., T6) that shows a significantly larger negative deflection to human faces than non-face stimuli.

Cartesian dualism

The philosophical position formulated by René Descartes asserting that the immaterial mind and the material body are distinct entities interacting via the pineal gland.

EEG frequency bands

Oscillatory brain rhythms categorized into Gamma (problem solving/concentration), Beta (busy/active mind), Alpha (reflective/restful), Theta (drowsiness), and Delta (deep sleep/dreaming).

Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS)

A standardized clinical score used to evaluate impaired consciousness and coma depth based on ocular, oral, and motor responses.

Neurofeedback

A biofeedback method using real-time recordings of brain activity (such as EEG) via amplifiers and displays to teach individuals self-regulation of brain states.

$^{11}\text{C}$-raclopride PET imaging in meditation

A molecular imaging protocol showing that during relaxation meditation, reduced binding of the $D_2$ antagonist $^{11}\text{C}$-raclopride in the ventral striatum signals increased endogenous dopamine release.