Cognitive Neuroscience Techniques Research Articles

Techniki neuronauki poznawczej w systemach wspomagania decyzji

Systemy wspomagania decyzji (SWD) w praktyce zarządzania nie są niczym nowym. Początek ich stosowania datuje się na połowę zeszłego wieku, ale w procesie ich rozwoju znacznie poszerzył się zestaw metod, które są wykorzystywane, aby ułatwić decydentom dokonywanie wyborów. Metodologia wspomagania decyzji opiera się przede wszystkim na logicznym wnioskowaniu oraz racjonalnych przesłankach ich podejmowania. Najnowsze badania interdyscyplinarne, prowadzone pod szyldem neuronauki poznawczej, pokazują jednakże, że bardzo istotne przy podejmowaniu decyzji są czynniki behawioralne i emocjonalne. Niestety, współczesne systemy wspomagania decyzji nie uwzględniają w wystarczającym stopniu tych aspektów. Zastosowanie technik neuronauki wydaje się jednak bardzo obiecującym kierunkiem rozwoju SWD. Celem artykułu jest analiza możliwości, jakie niesie ze sobą wykorzystanie narzędzi neuronaukowych w ramach systemów wspomagania decyzji, i wskazanie potencjalnych korzyści wypływających z uwzględnienia pozaracjonalnych determinant dokonywanych wyborów w procesie decyzyjnym.

Cognitive Neuroscience in Information Systems Research

This paper reviews cognitive neuroscience and several neurophysiological tools (e.g., fMRI, PET, EEG, MEG, and eye tracking). The strengths and weaknesses of such tools for information systems research are presented. The paper provides examples of existing cognitive neuroscience studies in varies areas, such as neuroeconomics, neuromarketing, and eye tracking. In addition, this paper provides an overview of brain areas that response to various mental processes, and discusses the localization and functionality of each brain area. Because of the popularity of eye-tracking research in information systems, measurements and metrics related and derived from eye-tracking technique (e.g., fixation, saccades and scanpath) are described and discussed in this paper. Opportunities for applying cognitive neuroscience techniques to IS research as well as future research directions are also discussed.

Evidencia y neurociencias cognitivas: El caso de la resonancia magnética funcional

La resonancia magnética funcional es una de las técnicas de neuroimagen más difundidas en las neurociencias cognitivas. Su influencia tuvo un rol importante en la configuración del costado experimental de este campo. Frente a esto, consideramos que su estatus como evidencia no sido suficientemente discutido en la literatura filosófica. Aquí nos centramos sobre este punto desde la óptica de la tensión clásica sobre el alcance de los enfoques localizacionistas en neurociencias. Atendemos al modo en que esta tensión se manifiesta hoy. Tomamos en cuenta un número de limitaciones que presenta la resonancia magnética funcional y analizamos el modo en que los investigadores les hacen frente. En función de esto, sostenemos que existe una medida importante en que la técnica puede ser orientada sobre la base de supuestos y consideraciones teóricas generales. Para sustentar nuestras ideas, tomamos algunos ejemplos recientes de abordajes neurocientíficos caracterizados por abordar de manera directa el carácer dinámico de la actividad a gran escala en el cerebro.

Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation of the Prefrontal Cortex in Awake Nonhuman Primates Evokes a Polysynaptic Neck Muscle Response That Reflects Oculomotor Activity at the Time of Stimulation

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) has emerged as an important technique in cognitive neuroscience, permitting causal inferences about the contribution of a given brain area to behavior. Despite widespread use, exactly how TMS influences neural activity throughout an interconnected network, and how such influences ultimately change behavior, remain unclear. The oculomotor system of nonhuman primates (NHPs) offers a potential animal model to bridge this gap. Here, based on results suggesting that neck muscle activity provides a sensitive indicator of oculomotor activation, we show that single pulses of TMS over the frontal eye fields (FEFs) in awake NHPs evoked rapid (within ∼25 ms) and fairly consistent (∼50-75% of all trials) expression of a contralateral head-turning synergy. This neck muscle response resembled that evoked by subsaccadic electrical microstimulation of the FEF. Systematic variation in TMS location revealed that this response could also be evoked from the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC). Combining TMS with an oculomotor task revealed state dependency, with TMS evoking larger neck muscle responses when the stimulated area was actively engaged. Together, these results advance the suitability of the NHP oculomotor system as an animal model for TMS. The polysynaptic neck muscle response evoked by TMS of the prefrontal cortex is a quantifiable trial-by-trial reflection of oculomotor activation, comparable to the monosynaptic motor-evoked potential evoked by TMS of primary motor cortex. Our results also speak to a role for both the FEF and dlPFC in head orienting, presumably via subcortical connections with the superior colliculus.

The Role of Noun Animacy in Language Processing

Animacy of nouns has been found significantly impacting the organization and processing of language in many ways. In particular, it imposes restrictions on the syntactic morphology and syntactic position, and the assignment of the thematic roles heavily relies on animacy. By recording reaction times and eye tracking, previous studies revealed that animacy of nouns facilitated comprehension of ambiguous sentences and complex sentences. With the development of cognitive neuroscience techniques, the neural mechanism of how animacy influences the assignment of thematic roles has been further explored during recent years. Some new theoretical models have been proposed to explain the relationship of syntax and semantics during sentence processing in a more comprehensive way. Based on existing studies and theories, we propose that future research should particularly focus on the immediate impact of animacy during online language processing, the interaction of animacy and syntactic information during the assignment of thematic roles, and the cross-language difference of these effects.

Current state-of-the-art of auditory functional MRI (fMRI) on zebra finches: Technique and scientific achievements

Songbirds provide an excellent model system exhibiting vocal learning associated with an extreme brain plasticity linked to quantifiable behavioral changes. This animal model has thus far been intensively studied using electrophysiological, histological and molecular mapping techniques. However, these approaches do not provide a global view of the brain and/or do not allow repeated measures, which are necessary to establish correlations between alterations in neural substrate and behavior. In contrast, functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) is a non-invasive in vivo technique which allows one (i) to study brain function in the same subject over time, and (ii) to address the entire brain at once. During the last decades, fMRI has become one of the most popular neuroimaging techniques in cognitive neuroscience for the study of brain activity during various tasks ranging from simple sensory-motor to highly cognitive tasks. By alternating various stimulation periods with resting periods during scanning, resting and task-specific regional brain activity can be determined with this technique. Despite its obvious benefits, fMRI has, until now, only been sparsely used to study cognition in non-human species such as songbirds. The Bio-Imaging Lab (University of Antwerp, Belgium) was the first to implement Blood Oxygen Level Dependent (BOLD) fMRI in songbirds – and in particular zebra finches – for the visualization of sound perception and processing in auditory and song control brain regions. The present article provides an overview of the establishment and optimization of this technique in our laboratory and of the resulting scientific findings. The introduction of fMRI in songbirds has opened new research avenues that permit experimental analysis of complex sensorimotor and cognitive processes underlying vocal communication in this animal model.

New frontiers in the neuroscience of the sense of agency.

The sense that I am the author of my own actions, including the ability to distinguish my own from other people's actions, is a fundamental building block of our sense of self, on the one hand, and successful social interactions, on the other. Using cognitive neuroscience techniques, researchers have attempted to elucidate the functional basis of this intriguing phenomenon, also trying to explain pathological abnormalities of action awareness in certain psychiatric and neurological disturbances. Recent conceptual, technological, and methodological advances suggest several interesting and necessary new leads for future research on the neuroscience of agency. Here I will describe new frontiers for the field such as the need for novel and multifactorial paradigms, anatomically plausible network models for the sense of agency, investigations of the temporal dynamics during agentic processing and ecologically valid virtual reality (VR) applications.

Representing actions through their sound

Since the discovery of 'mirror neurons' in the monkey premotor and parietal cortex, an increasing body of evidence in animals and humans alike has supported the notion of the inextricable link between action execution and action perception. Although research originally focused on the relationship between performed and viewed actions, more recent studies highlight the importance of representing the actions of others through audition. In the first part of this article, we discuss animal studies, which provide direct evidence that action is inherently linked to multi-sensory cues, as well as the studies carried out on healthy subjects by using state-of-the-art cognitive neuroscience techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), event-related potentials (ERP), magnetoencephalography (MEG), and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). In the second section, we review the lesion analysis studies in brain-damaged patients demonstrating the link between 'resonant' fronto-parieto-temporal networks and the ability to represent an action by hearing its sound. Moreover, we examine the evidence in favour of somatotopy as a possible representational rule underlying the auditory mapping of actions and consider the links between language and audio-motor action mapping. We conclude with a discussion of some outstanding questions for future research on the link between actions and the sounds they produce.

Intuitive reasoning in science and mathematics education: from the classroom to cognitive neuroscience and back

Event Abstract Back to Event Intuitive reasoning in science and mathematics education: from the classroom to cognitive neuroscience and back Reuven Babai1* and Ruth Stavy1 1 Tel Aviv University, Department of Science Education, Constantiner School of Education, Israel Our goal is to unveil the reasoning processes associated with overcoming intuitive interference in science and mathematics education. For this purpose we employ cognitive neuroscience techniques. We show that this research direction results in better understanding of students' difficulties and to improved teaching strategies. We focused on the comparison-of-perimeters task known to elicit incorrect intuitive responses. We measured accuracy, reaction time, and neural correlates (by fMRI) while participants compared the perimeters of geometrical shapes in two conditions: 1) congruent, in which correct response is in line with the intuitive reasoning (larger area–larger perimeter) and 2) incongruent, in which the correct answer is counterintuitive. In the incongruent condition accuracy dropped and reaction time for correct responses was longer than in the congruent condition. The congruent condition activated bilateral parietal brain areas, known to be involved in comparison of quantities, while correctly answering the incongruent condition activated bilateral prefrontal areas known for their executive control over other brain regions. These findings suggested the importance of control mechanisms in overcoming the intuitive interference and served as a basis for designing a successful classroom intervention. Recently we applied the prime-probe paradigm to study the effect of preactivation of inhibitory control mechanisms. The findings showed that when congruent trials followed incongruent prime, an increase in response time was observed as compared with congruent trials that followed congruent ones, and vice versa. In addition, when congruent trials followed incongruent prime, not only did response time increase, but accuracy significantly dropped as well. These findings further support the importance of inhibitory control mechanisms in overcoming intuitive interference. Our work argues that applying cognitive neuroscience techniques in science and mathematics education research could lead to a deeper understanding of students’ reasoning processes and to the development and evaluation of teaching strategies that would improve education. Conference: EARLI SIG22 - Neuroscience and Education, Zurich, Switzerland, 3 Jun - 5 Jun, 2010. Presentation Type: Poster Presentation Topic: Arithmetic and higher-order mathematics Citation: Babai R and Stavy R (2010). Intuitive reasoning in science and mathematics education: from the classroom to cognitive neuroscience and back. Front. Neurosci. Conference Abstract: EARLI SIG22 - Neuroscience and Education. doi: 10.3389/conf.fnins.2010.11.00007 Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters. The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated. Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed. For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions. Received: 26 May 2010; Published Online: 26 May 2010. * Correspondence: Reuven Babai, Tel Aviv University, Department of Science Education, Constantiner School of Education, Tel Aviv, Israel, reuvenb@post.tau.ac.il Login Required This action requires you to be registered with Frontiers and logged in. To register or login click here. Abstract Info Abstract The Authors in Frontiers Reuven Babai Ruth Stavy Google Reuven Babai Ruth Stavy Google Scholar Reuven Babai Ruth Stavy PubMed Reuven Babai Ruth Stavy Related Article in Frontiers Google Scholar PubMed Abstract Close Back to top Javascript is disabled. Please enable Javascript in your browser settings in order to see all the content on this page.

Transcranial magnetic stimulation studies of visuospatial attentional control

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is an established technique in cognitive neuroscience which is used to interrupt processing in the brain, creating a brief ‘virtual lesion’. Here, we review recent studies that have employed TMS to gain insight into the roles of frontal and parietal cortex in visuospatial attention control.

Neural network approaches and their reproducibility in the study of verbal working memory and Alzheimer’s disease

As clinical and cognitive neurosciences mature, the need for sophisticated neuroimaging analysis becomes more apparent. Multivariate analysis techniques have recently received increasing attention because they have attractive features that cannot be easily realized by the more commonly used univariate, voxel-wise, techniques. Multivariate approaches evaluate correlation/covariance of activation across brain regions, rather than proceeding on a voxel-by-voxel basis. Thus, their results can be more easily interpreted as a signature of neural networks. Univariate approaches, in contrast, cannot directly address functional connectivity in the brain. Apart from this conceptual difference, the covariance approach can also result in greater statistical power when compared with univariate techniques, which are forced to employ very stringent, and often overly conservative, corrections for voxel-wise multiple comparisons. Multivariate techniques also lend themselves much better to prospective application of results from the analysis of one dataset to entirely new datasets. We provide two examples that illustrate different uses of multivariate techniques in cognitive and clinical neuroscience. We hope this contribution helps facilitate wider dissemination of these techniques in the research community.

Single-trial EEG–fMRI reveals the dynamics of cognitive function

Two major non-invasive techniques in cognitive neuroscience, electroencephalography (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), have complementary advantages with regard to their spatial and temporal resolution. Recent hardware and software developments have made it feasible to acquire EEG and fMRI data simultaneously. We emphasize the potential of simultaneous EEG and fMRI recordings to pursue new strategies in cognitive neuroimaging. Specifically, we propose that, by exploiting the combined spatiotemporal resolution of the methods, the integration of EEG and fMRI recordings on a single-trial level enables the rich temporal dynamics of information processing to be characterized within spatially well-defined neural networks.

Aligning Multiple Research Techniques in Cognitive Neuroscience: Why Is It Important?

The need to align multiple experimental procedures and produce converging results so as to demonstrate that the phenomenon under investigation is real and not an artifact is a commonplace both in scientific practice and discussions of scientific methodology (Campbell and Stanley 1963; Wimsatt 1981). Although sometimes this is the purpose of aligning techniques, often there is a different purpose—multiple techniques are sought to supply different perspectives on the phenomena under investigation that need to be integrated to answer the questions scientists are asking. After introducing this function, I will illustrate it by considering three of the major techniques in cognitive neuroscience for linking cognitive function with neural structure.

Event-related functional MRI: implications for cognitive psychology.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has rapidly emerged as a powerful technique in cognitive neuroscience. We describe and critique a new class of imaging experimental designs called event-related fMRI that exploit the temporal resolution of fMRI by modeling fMRI signal changes associated with behavioral trials as opposed to blocks of behavioral trials. Advantages of this method over block designs include the ability to (a) randomize trial presentations, (b) test for functional correlates of behavioral measures with greater power, (c) directly examine the neural correlates of temporally dissociable components of behavioral trials (e.g., the delay period of a working memory task), and (d) test for differences in the onset time of neural activity evoked by different trial types. Consequently, event-related fMRI has the potential to address a number of cognitive psychology questions with a degree of inferential and statistical power not previously available.

On the role of selective attention in visual perception.

What is the role of selective attention in visual perception? Before answering this question, it is necessary to differentiate between attentional mechanisms that influence the identification of a stimulus from those that operate after perception is complete. Cognitive neuroscience techniques are particularly well suited to making this distinction because they allow different attentional mechanisms to be isolated in terms of timing and/or neuroanatomy. The present article describes the use of these techniques in differentiating between perceptual and postperceptual attentional mechanisms and then proposes a specific role of attention in visual perception. Specifically, attention is proposed to resolve ambiguities in neural coding that arise when multiple objects are processed simultaneously. Evidence for this hypothesis is provided by two experiments showing that attention-as measured electrophysiologically-is allocated to visual search targets only under conditions that would be expected to lead to ambiguous neural coding.

Discharge patterns and functional organization of mammalian retina.

Discharge patterns and functional organization of mammalian retina.