Cognitive Neuroscience Compendium

Please visit our YouTube channel, Cognitive Neuroscience Compedium, for more content!

This compendium of narrated videos and links to Web-based content was first assembled as supplementary online material to support the textbook Postle, B.R. (2015) Essentials of Cognitive Neuroscience (1st ed.), John Wiley & Sons, Chichester, U.K. Unique to it are the “narrated videos” (at the time “Web Clips”) that were solicited by the author and generously produced by > 40 colleagues whose work was either explicitly featured in the textbook, or selected to illustrate an important area of research that the book couldn’t cover. AND THEY ARE AMAZING. Now, a few years later, with a 2nd edition of the book underway, it’s been decided that these narrated videos are simply too good and potentially valuable to the community to be accessible only to those using this textbook. So here they are. Whether an instructor or a student or ‘just’ a civilian interested in the most interesting scientific questions known to humankind, you are encouraged to sample ad libitum, to watch, and to learn. Note that for the videos that describe a specific study, full references are provided in the description that appears below the video on its YouTube page.

Appearing after each section’s collection of narrated videos are links to other content on the Web that we think might also be useful for teaching. If you know of other content that we might add to this compendium, or might be interested in contributing a narrated video, please contact postle@wisc.edu.

Anatomy, Physiology, and Methods

Narrated Videos

– How does MRI work? Rasmus Birn

– MRI-based diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) and tractography Andrew Alexander

– Measuring the local field potential Mingzhou Ding

– How to perform an EEG experiment Dan Acheson

– An introduction to EEG analysis: event-related potentials Dan Acheson

– Measuring ‘neuronal oscillations for communication’ in the human, with electrocorticography (ECoG) Bradley Voytek

– Functional MRI (fMRI) Brad Postle

– How to perform an fMRI experiment Dan Acheson

– Fundamentals of experimental design with fMRI Brad Postle

– Resting state correlations in fMRI signal reveal the organization of the brain’s functional networks Gagan Wig

– Using neural network models to study visual knowledge representation Tim Rogers

Additional Links

– Kwabena Boahen, Stanford, “A computer that works like the brain”, (TEDGlobal 2007)

– Edward Boyden, MIT, “A light switch for neurons”, (TED 2011)

– Nikolaus Kriegeskorte, MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, “Representational similarity analysis of inferior temporal object population codes” (2010)

– Christopher deCharms, Omneuron, “A look inside the brain in real time”, (TED 2008)

– Scholarpedia entry on the thalamus

– Genes to Cognition Online, home of the rotatable, dissectible ‘3D Brain’ application (upper right corner, requires Flash)

– Toccata and Fugue in D minor for the cochlea

–“Designing and Analyzing fMRI Experiments” The entire course (sic) taught by Dr. Joseph Devlin at University College London.

Representation, Learning, and Memory

Narrated Videos

– Snapshots of H.M.’s contributions to the science of memory Suzanne Corkin

– Pattern separation in the hippocampus Craig Stark

– Relating the age-related decline in long-term memory to hippocampal structure and function Craig Stark

– Pattern completion in the hippocampus John Lisman

– What, if anything, is the medial temporal lobe? Elisabeth Murray

– Mental time travel in action Sean Polyn

– Past meets present: Prediction error drives episodic memory updating Morgan Barense

– Neural bases of repetition priming Jon Simons

– Semantic dementia Tim Rogers

– Sensory recruitment for visual working memory John Serences

– Dynamic population coding in prefrontal cortex Mark Stokes

Additional Links

– Anterograde amnesia (the case of Clive Wearing)

– Primary progressive aphasia, semantic variant

– Joshua Foer, “Feats of memory anyone can do”, (TED 2012)

Sensation, Perception, Attention, and Action

Narrated Videos

– Using neural network models to study visual knowledge Tim Rogers

– Neural bases of 3D motion perception Bas Rokers

– How do we become aware of what we see? Vincenzo Romei

– Experience-dependent plastic reorganization of auditory cortex Shaowen Bao

– The raison d’être of the ventral visual pathway Chris Baker

– Encoding place and time in the hippocampus Howard Eichenbaum

– Oculomotor control in youth and adolescence Beatriz Luna

– Dopaminergic modulation of the functions of the frontal eye fields Behrad Noudoost

– Attention, intention, and retention in frontoparietal cortex Clay Curtis

– A causal test of face recognition in the FFA Josef Parvizi

Additional Links

– Neil Burgess, University College in London, “How your brain tells you where you are”, (TEDSalon London, 2011)

– Vilayanur Ramachandran, UC San Diego, “The neurons that shaped civilization”, (TEDIndia 2009)

– Mapping the receptive field of an orientation-selective neuron in V1

– Simulation of basilar membrane response to acoustic stimuli

– Robert Zatorre, McGill University, “Music in the brain: Pitch, Imagery, and Emotion”, (2011)

– Mapping the receptive field of an orientation-selective neuron in V1

– Simulation of basilar membrane response to acoustic stimuli

– Unilateral neglect: the clock drawing test

– Unilateral neglect in a canine

– Parkinson’s disease

– Huntington’s disease

– Associative agnosia

– Prosopagnosia

– The Simons Lab at University of Pittsburgh studies the rodent barrel cortex, a distinctly shaped part of the animal’s somatosensory cortex

– The Object Perception Lab at Vanderbilt University has an article which discusses specialized systems vs. expertise

Cognitive Control and High-Level Cognition

Narrated Videos

– Leveraging graph theory to understand the large-scale organization of cognitive control Mark D’Esposito

– The development of cognitive control: inhibition or proactive control? Yuko Munakata

– Thalamic control of interareal synchrony as a mechanism for cognitive control Yuri Saalmann

– The effect of playing action video games on perceptual decision making C. Shawn Greene

– Adolescent decision making Leah Somerville

– The cognitive neuroscience of free will John-Dylan Haynes

– The connectomics of Phineas Gage John Van Horn

– The neuropsychology of moral judgment Michael Koenigs

– Stimulating desire: optogenetic stimulation of the central amygdala Michael Robinson

– Effects of meditation on cognitive and neural function Heleen Slagter

– Unification for ‘on-the-fly’ production and comprehension of language Peter Hagoort

– Studying sleep (and consciousness) with TMS-EEG Marcello Massimini

– Toward a quantitative index of consciousness Olivia Gosseries

Additional Links

– History of Phineas Gage

– Project Implicit at Harvard, which measures implicit biases

– Simon Fisher, a geneticist at the Donders Institute in the Netherlands who studies how genetics affect language

– Antonio Rangel, California Institute of Technology, “The neuroeconomics of simple choice”, (TEDxCaltech 2013)

– Rebecca Saxe, MIT, “How we read each other’s minds”, (TEDGlobal 2009)

– Mohammed Milad, Massachusetts General Hospital & Harvard Medical School, “To fear or not to fear: Where and how in the brain” (2011)

– Wernicke’s aphasia

– Broca’s aphasia

– Hakwan Lau, Columbia University, “How to study the functions of subjective awareness?”, (2012)

– Victor Lamme, University of Amsterdam, “When is a neural representation a conscious one?”, (2014)

– The Owen Lab at Western University in Canada studies consciousness in brain-damaged individuals and how neurodegenerative diseases affect memory, perception, and reasoning problems