Cognitive Neuroscience
Summary
Cognitive neuroscience investigates how mental processes such as perception, attention, memory, language, decision-making and social cognition arise from brain activity. Drawing on psychology, neuroanatomy, electrophysiology and computational modelling, the field seeks mechanistic accounts that link cellular and synaptic events to distributed network dynamics and ultimately to behaviour. Key methods include functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), electroencephalography (EEG), magnetoencephalography (MEG) and invasive single-unit recordings. These tools reveal how specialised cortical and subcortical circuits represent sensory inputs, maintain internal models in working memory, select responses and update those models via feedback. Advances in high-field imaging, optogenetics and large-scale neural recordings are driving ever finer-grained descriptions of the neural codes and plasticity mechanisms that underlie learning, cognition and spontaneous thought.
Research from Nature Portfolio
New insights into the neural basis of familiar-face recognition have emerged from work showing that neurons in anterior inferotemporal face patches rotate their population coding axis at long latency to distinguish familiar from unfamiliar faces. This temporal multiplexing explains how the same cell populations encode both perception and memory of faces. A complementary study using intracerebral microelectrodes in the human midfusiform gyrus demonstrated that within 50 ms of categorising an image as a face, populations of neurons reliably signal face familiarity, providing a mechanistic account of rapid access to person knowledge. Finally, longitudinal high-resolution MRI of ageing adults revealed that integrity of the noradrenergic locus coeruleus predicts future episodic memory decline, whereas dopaminergic midbrain integrity more closely tracks working memory trajectories, dissociating neuromodulatory contributions to late-life cognitive changes.
Cognitive Neuroscience publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in cognitive neuroscience across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI): A noninvasive method that measures blood-oxygenation-level-dependent (BOLD) signal fluctuations as an indirect index of local neural activity.
Hemodynamic response function (HRF): The characteristic time course of the BOLD signal following a brief burst of neural activity, typically peaking 4–6 s post-stimulus.
Single-unit recording: An invasive electrophysiological technique that measures action-potential firing from individual neurons, providing high temporal and spatial precision.
Functional connectivity: Statistical dependencies, often measured as correlations, between activity time-series of distinct brain regions.
Population code: A representation of information by the collective activity of a group of neurons, in which patterns of firing across the ensemble carry stimulus or memory content.
Neuromodulation: Regulation of neural network states and plasticity by diffusely projecting neurotransmitter systems (e.g., noradrenaline, dopamine) that influence arousal, attention and learning.
References
- Temporal multiplexing of perception and memory codes in IT cortex. Nature (2024).
- Single neuron responses underlying face recognition in the human midfusiform face-selective cortex. Nature Communications (2023).
- The integrity of dopaminergic and noradrenergic brain regions is associated with different aspects of late-life memory performance. Nature Aging (2023).
- Modifiable dementia risk factors associated with objective and subjective cognition. Alzheimer's & Dementia (2024).
- Individual differences in frequency and impact of daily memory lapses: results from a national lifespan sample. BMC Geriatrics (2023).
- Virtual navigation tested on a mobile app is predictive of real-world wayfinding navigation performance. PLOS ONE (2019).
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