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Cognitive neuroscience explores how higher mental functions such as language, reasoning and decision-making arise in humans; cognitive neuroscientists also study neurological conditions like stroke, Alzheimer’s disease or epilepsy that impair these processes.
Distractions
As traffic accidents continue to rise, scientists are becoming increasingly focused on what causes impaired driving behavior. Distracted driving is defined by lack of attention, decreased inhibition, difficulty shifting focus between tasks, and difficulty switching tasks – factors which include environmental and internal influences like cognitive deficits (such as distraction management and working memory deficits) as well as psychological ones (anxiety and depression), neurological conditions like dementia or Alzheimer’s.
Cognitive neuroscience research addresses longstanding questions about brain and mind from multiple disciplines, spanning psychology & neuroscience, psychiatry, medicine, biology, philosophy, sociology economics engineering math computer science linguistics as well as engineering math computer science linguistics. Cognitive neuroscience utilizes epidemiologic, neuropsychological and behavioral experimental and neuroimaging approaches to investigate neural bases of cognitive function or dysfunction.
Visual Attention
Cognitive neuroscience is an emerging field that investigates the origins and mechanisms behind behavior, specifically how the brain generates it. With this information in hand, cognitive neuroscience provides opportunities to design pharmacological interventions for mental disorders; detect behavioral changes caused by diseases like Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s; and gain greater insight into how our minds work overall.
Recent experiments in cognitive neuroscience have focused primarily on understanding how one individual processes information through measuring individual neurons’ responses to stimuli. Recently, however, research has begun to examine communal neural processing by exploring the degree to which people’s neural networks interact (e.g. brain-to-brain synchrony in default mode networks).
Experiments have demonstrated how dopamine affects attention by way of its effects on the PFC/FEF and associated brain networks, with D1 receptors playing key roles in modulating attention as superficial layers, while D2 receptors located deeper within PFC/FEF regions play crucial roles.
Auditory Attention
Research proves that paying less attention to auditory stimuli can actually diminish driving performance. Secondary acoustic or visual stimuli that distract drivers negatively impacted braking response behavior among both young and older drivers, especially when these stimuli required the use of cognitive resources for processing (measured using P3b components of event-related potentials).
These findings indicate that aging may alter inhibitory subprocesses more selectively depending on tasks and stimulus modality, leading to impaired resistance to distractions and diminished inhibition of prepotent responses – both potentially having serious ramifications on driving safety.
Science’s advancement of Gestalt theory, neuropsychology and the cognitive revolution were among several developments which gave birth to cognitive neuroscience as an interdisciplinary field. Recently an emerging area of study has examined communal knowledge systems; using standard neuroscience methods with groups or perhaps eventually larger communities.
Decision Making
Researchers have revealed that cognitive development during adolescence can impact young drivers’ ability to control their vehicle, manage distractions and make rapid decisions in critical driving situations. This knowledge is key in understanding how aging and health-related factors may alter young drivers’ driving behavior.
Cognitive neuroscience’s central assumption is that knowledge processing takes place inside individual brains, with knowledge resulting from neural processes in each person (see Fig. 1). Accordingly, neuroimaging methods should reveal these underlying brain mechanisms that enable human cognition.
An emerging field of research is challenging these assumptions and showing that much of human cognition involves collective efforts from different communities (e.g. scientists working on climate change but also fans of football). Furthermore, this work has demonstrated it is possible to extend standard neuroimaging techniques so as to assess brain-to-brain networks of individuals, couples, or larger groups (Montague et al. 2002; Hasson and Frith 2016).