Cognitive neuroscience

• What is cognitive neuroscience?

  Discipline that is a combination of several other disciplines, notably cognitive psychology, cognitive science and neuroscience. Its focus is to look for biological basis to thought processes, specifically at how the neurons explain those processes.
• How was cognitive neuroscience formed?

  Formally formed in MIT in 1956 and cognitive neuroscience was coined by George Miller and Michael Gazzaniga in the 1970s.
• What is neuroimaging?

  Includes PET scans (positron emission tomography) and fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging). From these scans we can see which areas of the brain are activated for which types of activities, so we can build a detailed map of the brains function.
• What did Tulving Et Al (1994) experiment include?

  Got participants to perform memory tasks whilst having a PET scan.
• What was found from Tulving Et Al (1994) experiment?

  That episodic and semantic memories were both recalled from the prefrontal cortex. This area is divided into two hemispheres of the brain, the left was semantic and the right was episodic.
• What did Maguire (2009) experiment include?

  Conducted research on taxi drivers. The aim of the study was to investigate the function of the hippocampus in spatial memory. The taxi drivers were compared with the MRI scans of 50 healthy males who did not drive taxis.
• What was found from Maguire (2009) experiment?

  The hippocampi of taxi drivers were significantly larger relative to those of control subjects. The hippocampal volume correlated with the amount of time spent as a taxi driver (the longer the participant had been working the larger his hippocampus)
• What are the strengths of cognitive neuroscience?

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  • This means the study has stablished a credible scientific basis
  • Tulving's PET study emphasises how cognitive neuroscience can help explain the complexity of internal mental processes like memory, and what role the brain plays in them.
• What are the weaknesses of cognitive neuroscience?

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  • Expensive
  • Does mapping the areas of the brain actually give us any more information about the mental processes?