PSYCHOLOGICAL CONCEPTS IN COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE

Are Temporal Concepts Embodied? A Challenge for Cognitive Neuroscience

Is time an embodied concept? People often talk and think about temporal concepts in terms of space. This observation, along with linguistic and experimental behavioral data documenting a close conceptual relation between space and time, is often interpreted as evidence that temporal concepts are embodied. However, there is little neural data supporting the idea that our temporal concepts are gr...

The Cognitive Neuroscience of Placebo Effects: Concepts, Predictions, and Physiology.

Placebos have been used ubiquitously throughout the history of medicine. Expectations and associative learning processes are important psychological determinants of placebo effects, but their underlying brain mechanisms are only beginning to be understood. We examine the brain systems underlying placebo effects on pain, autonomic, and immune responses. The ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC)...

The Challenges of Cognitive Neuroscience in the 21st Century

Motivation concepts in behavioral neuroscience.

Concepts of motivation are vital to progress in behavioral neuroscience. Motivational concepts help us to understand what limbic brain systems are chiefly evolved to do, i.e., to mediate psychological processes that guide real behavior. This article evaluates some major motivation concepts that have historic importance or have influenced the interpretation of behavioral neuroscience research. T...

DT-MRI Tractography and its Application in Cognitive Neuroscience

Recent advancement of MRI techniques and development of new methods of image analysis have allowed us to study large neural tracts within the human brain. This is based on the principle of diffusion tensor MRI that is similar to that of diffusion-weighted imaging but takes magnitude and direction of the diffusion of water into account. Using this technique we have been able to define large neur...