دانلود کتاب ملزومات علوم اعصاب شناختی

Does the world need another cognitive neuroscience textbook? Well, “need” is such a loaded word. What I’ll try to do here is summarize my motivation for initially writing this book and, subsequently, revising it twice. In the process, I’ll also try to convey the pedagogical vision behind choices about style, content, and organization. For the past 25 years, I have taught cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience to undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. For undergraduates in the honors program, I offer a seminar that is linked to a large- enrollment lecture course on cognitive psychology. The lecture course is a survey of cognitive psychology, spanning sensation, and perception to decision- making, language, and consciousness. The honors seminar, the original impetus for this book, is populated by 15 or so students who are concurrently enrolled in the lecture course. In the seminar, which meets only once per week, for only 50 minutes (sic), we discuss the cognitive neuroscience of what’s been covered in that week’s cognitive psychology lectures. The modal student in this seminar has a background in experimental design and in probability and statistics for experimental psychology; only some have any formal training in biology, and fewer still in neuroscience. In this context, I have found that a textbook that attempts to cover “everything that we know” in the field is not effective – either it will be too superficial in its coverage to support substantive discussions in class or it will be inappropriately lengthy and dense, a cognitive neuroscience analogue of the >1000- page medical- school neuroscience textbook that I lugged around as a graduate student in systems neuroscience. Another approach, which is to assign papers from the primary literature, has proven to be an unsatisfactory alternative, because it results in an inordinate amount of class time being taken up with the remedial work of filling in background that the assigned papers don’t cover, and explaining methods so that students can fully understand how the experiments were performed and how their results can be interpreted. Essentials of Cognitive Neuroscience aspires to be a textbook that will support high- level, substantive engagement with the material in settings where contact hours and/or expectations for outside- of- the- classroom preparation time may be constrained. It introduces and explicates key principles and concepts in cognitive neuroscience in such a way that the reader will be equipped to critically evaluate the ever- growing body of findings that the field is generating. For some students, this knowledge will be needed for subsequent formal study, and for all readers, it will be needed to evaluate and interpret reports about cognitive neuroscience research that make their way daily into the news media and popular culture. The book seeks to do so in a style that will give the student a sense of what it’s like to be a cognitive neuroscientist: when confronted with a problem, how does one proceed? How does one read and interpret research that’s outside of one’s subarea of specialization? How do two scientists advancing mutually incompatible models interrelate? Most importantly, what does it feel like to partake in the wonder and excitement of this most dynamic and fundamental of sciences? To translate these aspirations into a book, I have made the following pedagogical and organizational choices: • The introductory section is organized into three preliminary chapters, one on history and key concepts, one a primer on cellular and circuit- level neurobiology, and one an introduction to classical approaches to the study of cognitive neuroscience while introducing principles of sensation and perception. These are followed by a chapter on methods and one on prominent contemporary theoretical frameworks and computational approaches. These latter two, newly introduced for the second edition and now for the third edition, respectively, merit some additional explication. • My own preference when teaching is to introduce methods throughout the course of the semester, at the point at which they are relevant for the research question that is being described. Thus, the first edition of this book did not include a chapter dedicated to Methods of Cognitive Neuroscience. When we solicited feedback from instructors who had used the first edition, however, we learned not all share this preference. Thus, subsequent editions have included a stand- alone chapter on methods (Chapter 4), and any instructor following the “Postle preference” can do as I will do: omit this chapter as a stand- alone assignment during the first week of the course, and, instead, assign one or more relevant sections to supplement domain- of- cognition- themed readings the first time that a method is introduced. (Recommendations for how to do this are provided with the instructor guide.) • Newly added for this third edition is Chapter 5: Theoretical Frameworks and Computational Approaches, which was necessitated to accommodate the ongoing explosion of new developments at the levels of theory and analysis, particularly in the realm of computational approaches. More specifically, if the early chapter on The Visual System was to be reasonably coherent (i.e., not interrupted on each page by lengthy theoretical or methodological digression), the reader would already need to be conversant with such topics as predictive coding, machine learning- derived analysis techniques, and representational similarity analysis. (And the same would be true for the early chapter on skeletomotor control for Hebbian plasticity, dynamical systems theory, reinforcement learning, recurrent neural networks, and representational geometry analysis.) Therefore, new to this third edition is a reworked Chapter 3 that introduces “classical” concepts of sensory systems (e.g., the transduction of energy into a neural code, the receptive field, feedforward/“bottom- up” versus feedback/“top- down” signaling) so as to provide context and motivation for content from Chapter 5, such as why an idea like predictive coding, or a method like multivariate pattern analysis, might be valuable for supplementing (or, in some cases, supplanting) the principles adopted or developed during the first quarter century of cognitive neuroscience as a formal discipline. • Important concepts are introduced and explained via experiments that illustrate them. These won’t always be the first experiment that is credited with introducing an idea, nor even an experiment performed by the investigator or group that is credited with innovating the idea. Rather, they will be ones that I feel are particularly effective for explicating the concept in question. Further, most of the experiments that make it into this book are considered in a fair amount of depth. In doing so, I seek to model a “best practice” of the cognitive neuroscientist, one that is captured by a quote from the nineteenth- century neuroscientist David Ferrier, “In investigating reports on diseases and injuries of the brain . . . I feel obliged always to go to the fountainhead – dirty and muddy though this frequently turns out.” A corollary to this point is that because cognitive neuroscientists learn about and work with key concepts via empirical findings, almost all of the figures in this book are taken directly from the primary scientific literature, just as they appear in the empirical reports or review papers in which they were published. This is also how I teach and reflects my conviction that an important skill for students to develop is how to interpret figures as they appear in scientific publications. Thus, the book contains only a minimum of figures/diagrams/cartoons that were developed expressly for pedagogical purposes. • Because a book targeting “essentials” can’t cover all of the areas of research that fall under the rubric of cognitive neuroscience, each chapter concludes with an annotated list of suggested Further Reading. Many of the listed works will provide effective entrées into an area that the book doesn’t cover. • The first edition of this book was accompanied by a companion website that included 6–12 (or so)- minute bespoke narrated audiovisual presentations contributed by over 40 experts in different areas of cognitive neuroscience. These have now been spun off from the book and are made publicly available at https://postlab.psych.wisc.edu/cognitive-neurosciencecompendium/. Through these presentations, students will hear directly from the experts themselves about either (1) an important experiment that is described in the book and that I think merits a telling from the perspective of the investigator who actually performed the study, or (2) an important area of cognitive neuroscience that can’t be covered in the book but that the reader really should know about. These narrated videos generate a frisson of “what it’s like” to work in this field. I am greatly indebted to my colleagues who contributed their time and expertise to this remarkable collection. (Poignantly, those from Corkin, Eichenbaum, and Lisman capture the wisdom and energy of colleagues from whom we can no longer learn through direct interaction.) Although conceived and written for an upper- level undergraduate readership, Essentials of Cognitive Neuroscience can also be used for graduate teaching. For example, one associate of mine has used it as the primary text in a general “Introduction to Cognitive Neuroscience” course in which each week a student presented a chapter to the class and led the ensuing discussion. In my graduate seminar, assigned readings from this book cover the background that every student needs to know before coming to the class, and in class we focus on more recent developments. Those of us who are lucky enough to make a living grappling with some facet of the mind–brain problem have a responsibility to impart to our students a sense of the wonder, awe, and excitement that permeate our professional lives. I hope this book can help some of us meet this responsibility.