Online research in philosophy

Brain imaging has been immensely valuable in showing us how the mind works. However, many of our ideas about how the mind works come from disciplines like experimental psychology, artificial intelligence and linguistics, which in their modern form date back to the computer revolution of the 1940s, and are not strongly linked to the subdisciplines of biomedicine. Cognitive science and neuroscience thus have very separate intellectual roots, and very different styles. Unfortunately, these two areas of knowledge have not been well (...) integrated as far as higher mental processes are concerned. So how can these two be reconciled in order to develop a full understanding of the mind and brain? -/- This is the focus of this landmark book from leaders in the field. Coming more than two decades after Shallice's classic 'From neuropsychology to mental structure', 'The Organisation of Mind' establishes a strong historical, empirical, and theoretical basis for cognitive neuroscience. -/- The book starts by reviewing the history and intellectual roots of the field, looking at some of the researchers who guided and influenced it. The basic principles - theoretical and empirical and the inferential relation between them - are then considered with particular emphasis being placed on inferences to the organisation of the cognitive system from two empirical methodologies - neuropsychology and functional imaging. The core skeleton of the cognitive system is then analysed for the areas most critical for understanding rational thought. In the third section the components of simple cognitive acts are described, namely semantic processing, working memory, and cognitive operations. In the final section, more complex higher-level modulating processes are considered, including, supervisory processing, episodic memory, consciousness and problem-solving. -/- This will be a seminal publication on the interface between the brain sciences and the cognitive sciences and essential reading for all students and researchers in related fields. (shrink)

We discuss the development of cognitive neuroscience in terms of the tension between the greater sophistication in cognitive concepts and methods of the cognitive sciences and the increasing power of more standard biological approaches to understanding brain structure and function. There have been major technological developments in brain imaging and advances in simulation, but there have also been shifts in emphasis, with topics such as thinking, consciousness, and social cognition becoming fashionable within the brain sciences. The discipline has great promise (...) in terms of applications to mental health and education, provided it does not abandon the cognitive perspective and succumb to reductionism. (shrink)

The scientific study of the human mind and brain has come of age with the advent of technologically advanced methods for imaging brain structure and activity in health and disease, plus computational theories of cognition. These advances are leading to sophisticated new accounts for how mental processes are implemented in the human brain, but they also raise new challenges. -/- Mental Processes in the Human Brain provides an integrative overview of the rapid advances and future challenges in understanding the neurobiological (...) basis of mental processes that are characteristically (and in some cases, perhaps uniquely) human, including: language; thought; understanding of others; attention; planning and decision-making; emotion; memory; prediction; and awareness itself. The book also presents the latest insights into how these various processes can break down after brain injury. With chapters from some of leading figures in the brain sciences, this book will be essential for all those in the cognitive and brain sciences. (shrink)

Connectionist models offer concretemechanisms for cognitive processes. When these modelsmimic the performance of human subjects theycan offer insights into the computationswhich might underlie human cognition. We illustratethis with the performance of a recurrentconnectionist network which produces the meaningof words in response to their spellingpattern. It mimics a paradoxical pattern oferrors produced by people trying to read degradedwords. The reason why the network produces thesurprising error pattern lies in the nature ofthe attractors which it develops as it learns tomap spelling patterns (...) to semantics. The keyrole of attractor structure in the successfulsimulation suggests that the normal adult semanticreading route may involve attractor dynamics, andthus the paradoxical error pattern isexplained. (shrink)