Cognition and cognitive neuroscience
The term Cognition is commonly used to describe mental processes such as reasoning, remembering, recognising, perceiving (i.e. seeing, touching, hearing, etc.) and many other tasks which humans undertake with apparent ease but which are, in fact, highly complex. Cognitive Neuroscience is the scientific discipline which has developed in order to study how these complex processes are implemented in the brain.
The study of Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience is a multi-disciplinary enterprise, involving a range of complimentary techniques and associated technologies including:
- Classical experimental psychology
- Measurement of reaction times and eye movements
- Neuroimaging (e.g. using EEG or MRI technologies)
- Mathematical modelling and computational simulation
Accordingly, Cognitive Neuroscientists come from a range of scientific backgrounds (Psychology, Engineering, Mathematics, Biology, etc.) and collaboration between group members with complimentary expertise is common. In order to foster such collaborations, we have regular, informal meetings at which group members and visiting speakers present research ideas and findings.
Projects
Our research projects can be broadly grouped into themes which include:
- Reasoning and decision making
- Memory and recollection
- Motivation, emotion and reward
- Time perception
- Face recognition
- Language processing (including spoken English, speechreading and British Sign Language (BSL))
- Limb embodiment and embodied cognition
- Visual processing and the visual system
- Multisensory integration (e.g. how do vision and touch cooperate?)
- Cortical plasticity
- Embodied cognition
- Reasoning as we read
Furthermore, several of our research projects explore these themes with a view to understanding the changes in cognition that can occur in:
- Ageing
- Parkinson’s Disease
- Brain injury and brain damage
