The Neurobiology of Cognition and Behavior

Neurobiology of Cognition and Behavior is one of the initial textbooks of brain mapping in the field of cognitive neuroscience. This well-researched text by a leading expert in the field provides a foundational map of the human brain for cognition and behavior. This comprehensive map of essential human thinking and emotion is based on the explosion in the field of functional neuroimaging studies (fMRI, PET) in the normally functioning human brain. The approach of this text is to confirm the association of these brain regions by verifying that damage to the activated brain area results in a consistent deficit in the cognitive/behavioral operation under investigation. The approach used to form this view of mapping brain and cognition is based on cognitive neuroscience principles of defining dissociable, fine-grained cognitive units and associating these units with brain regions encoding for these units or aspects of the units from both functional imaging and lesion studies. These cognitive-brain relationships are incorporated into clinical syndromes to account for the behavior of these patients after a lesion occurs, with the added feature of presenting patient videos demonstrating the disrupted cognitive behaviors. This comprehensive textbook provides a framework of the basic architecture of cognition in the brain with this combination of activation and lesion study confirmation of the brain-behavior associations. This basic framework is useful for those students studying the interaction of cognitive science and neuroanatomy as well as being relevant to the experienced neuroscientist researcher or clinician.