TINS special issue: The Neural Substrates of Cognition The neural substrates of cognition

Introduction The reviews in this issue of TINS represent a particularly interesting subset of formal presentations at a meeting held last year in Madrid, Spain. This meeting was sponsored by the Juan March Foundation, was organized by myself, Adam Sillito and Javier Cudeiro, and was entitled ‘The Neural Substrates of Cognition’. Further details of the meeting, including a list of speakers, can be found at http://www.udc.es/dep/medicina/neurocom_arch/ juanmarch.htm. Sadly, The Juan March Foundation, long a sponsor of such meetings, announced that this would be their last meeting on a topic of neuroscience. The rationale for the meeting was based on dramatic, recent advances in our understanding of neuronal substrates, mostly at the cortical level, for various cognitive processes, including plasticity and attention. The meeting was characterized by excellent and provocative presentations and lively discussions, which are hard to reproduce in a journal format. Nonetheless, the papers presented here cover a subset of the topics presented and discussed, and do a good job of representing the flavor of the meeting.