Section 1

Outline

I. What is cognitive neuroscience?

II. Ontology

III. Philosophy of mind

A. Dualism: physical and mental are two fundamental domains of existence

1. interactionism

2. epiphenomenalism

3. parallelism

B. Idealism: the fundamental domain of reality is the mental

C. Physicalism: the fundamental domain of reality is the physical.

1. identity theory

2. behaviorism

3. functionalism

IV. Phenomenological mind and computational mind

A. A functionalist approach has been proposed by Jackendoff

1. the phenomenological notion of mind

2. the computational notion of mind

3. From this perspective, we can say that cognitive neuroscience studies the computational mind-brain relation.

V. A matter of correlation

VI. The cognitive neuroscience triangle

A. To approach this problem, cognitive neuroscience attempts to establish correlations between cognitive phenomena and neural phenomena, using 3 major domains:

1. cognition (behavior & models)

2. brain (neurophysiology & neuroanatomy)

3. computation (analyses & models)

VII. The concept of neural networks in neuropsychology

A. The modular paradigm fails

B. The network paradigm has taken centuries to be developed. Even now it is not universally accepted, but its acceptance is rapidly growing.

C. Localizationism vs globalism

1. Phrenology

a) Incorrect assumptions

b) Correct assumptions

2. Globalism

3. The controversy continued

4. The distributed view: distinction between complex & elementary functions

a) John Hughlings Jackson

b) Carl Wernicke

c) Lev Vygotskii

d) Summary of distributed view:

(1) Elementary functions are localized, but the brain works in a distributed manner to produce complex functions that are not localized.

(2) Complex functions are carried out by distributed combinations of simple functions.

VIII. The concept of neural networks in artificial intelligence

A. The Serial Symbol Processing (SSP) approach

1. The Turing Machine

2. The Von Neumann computer

B. The Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP) approach

1. Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts

2. Donald Hebb

3. Frank Rosenblatt

4. Minsky & Papert

5. Properties of artificial neural networks

6. Backward error propagation

IX. Essentials of the network paradigm in cognitive neuroscience

X. Methods in cognitive neuroscience

1. Lesion analysis

2. Neural recording

3. Functional brain imaging

4. Computational and mathematical modeling