Cognitive neuroscience is the scientific field that is concerned with the study of the biological processes and aspects that underlie cognition, with a specific focus on the neural connections in the brain which are involved in mental processes. It addresses the questions of how cognitive activities are affected or controlled by neural circuits in the brain. Cognitive neuroscience is a branch of both neuroscience and psychology, overlapping with disciplines such as behavioral neuroscience, cognitive psychology, physiological psychology and affective neuroscience. Cognitive neuroscience relies upon theories in cognitive science coupled with evidence from neurobiology, and computational modeling.
Linda B. Smith is an American developmental psychologist internationally recognized for her theoretical and empirical contributions to developmental psychology and cognitive science, proposing, through theoretical and empirical studies, a new way of understanding developmental processes. Smith's works are groundbreaking and illuminating for the field of perception, action, language, and categorization, showing the unique flexibility found in human behavior. She has shown how perception and action are ways of obtaining knowledge for cognitive development and word learning.
Robert Goldstone is a Distinguished Professor of psychology and cognitive science at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. His research interests include concept learning and representation, perceptual learning, collective behavior, and computational modeling of human cognition. He has developed and empirically tested neural network models that simultaneously learn new perceptual and conceptual representations, with the learned concepts both affecting and being affected by perception. He has also developed computational models of how groups of people compete for resources, cooperate to solve problems, exchange information and innovations, and form coalitions.
John Terrence Cacioppo was the Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. He founded the University of Chicago Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience and was the director of the Arete Initiative of the Office of the Vice President for Research and National Laboratories at the University of Chicago. He co-founded the field of social neuroscience and was member of the department of psychology, department of psychiatry and behavioral neuroscience, and the college until his death in March 2018.
Richard Shiffrin is an American psychologist, professor of cognitive science in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Indiana University, Bloomington. Shiffrin has contributed a number of theories of attention and memory to the field of psychology. He co-authored the Atkinson–Shiffrin model of memory in 1968 with Richard Atkinson, who was his academic adviser at the time. In 1977, he published a theory of attention with Walter Schneider. With Jeroen G.W. Raaijmakers in 1980, Shiffrin published the Search of Associative Memory (SAM) model, which has served as the standard model of recall for cognitive psychologists well into the 2000s. He extended the SAM model with the Retrieving Effectively From Memory (REM) model in 1997 with Mark Steyvers.
Wolfgang Prinz is a German cognitive psychologist. He is the director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, and an internationally recognized expert in experimental psychology, cognitive psychology and philosophy of mind. He is the founder of the common coding theory between perception and action that has a significant impact in cognitive neuroscience and social cognition.
Nora S. Newcombe is the Laura H. Carnell Professor of Psychology and the James H. Glackin Distinguished Faculty Fellow at Temple University. She is a Canadian-American researcher in cognitive development, cognitive psychology and cognitive science, and expert on the development of spatial thinking and reasoning and episodic memory. She was the principal investigator of the Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center (2006-2018), one of six Science of Learning Centers funded by the National Science Foundation.
Some of the research that is conducted in the field of psychology is more "fundamental" than the research conducted in the applied psychological disciplines, and does not necessarily have a direct application. The subdisciplines within psychology that can be thought to reflect a basic-science orientation include biological psychology, cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, and so on. Research in these subdisciplines is characterized by methodological rigor. The concern of psychology as a basic science is in understanding the laws and processes that underlie behavior, cognition, and emotion. Psychology as a basic science provides a foundation for applied psychology. Applied psychology, by contrast, involves the application of psychological principles and theories yielded up by the basic psychological sciences; these applications are aimed at overcoming problems or promoting well-being in areas such as mental and physical health and education.
Isabel Gauthier is a cognitive neuroscientist currently holding the position of David K. Wilson Professor of Psychology and head of the Object Perception Lab at Vanderbilt University’s Department of Psychology. In 2000, with the support of the James S. McDonnell Foundation, she founded the Perceptual Expertise Network (PEN), which now comprises over ten labs based across North America. In 2006 PEN became part of the NSF-funded Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center (TDLC).
The Comparative Cognition Society (CCS) is one of the primary scientific societies for the study of animal cognition and comparative psychology. The CCS is a non-profit, international society dedicated to gaining a greater understanding of the nature and evolution of cognition in human and non-human animals.
David Amodio is an American scientist who examines the psychological and neural mechanisms underlying social behavior, with a focus on self-regulation and intergroup relations. Amodio is known for his role in developing the field of social neuroscience and for his neuroscientific approach to social psychology.
Professor Warren Meck was a professor in psychology and neuroscience at Duke University. His main field of interest was Interval-Timing mechanisms and subjective time perception. He was editor in chief in the journal of Timing & Time Perception. He introduced an interesting time perception model in 1984 and 2005. He explained that time is created in a dedicated module in the certain internal clock. Meck has over 19,000 citations in google scholar.
Avishai Henik is an Israeli neurocognitive psychologist who works at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU). Henik studies voluntary and automatic (non-voluntary/reflexive) processes involved in cognitive operations. He characterizes automatic processes, and clarifies their importance, the relationship between automatic and voluntary processes, and their neural underpinnings. Most of his work involves research with human participants and in recent years, he has been working with Archer fish to examine evolutionary aspects of various cognitive functions.
Sharon Thompson-Schill is the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her research covers the field of biological basis of human cognitive systems, including language, memory, perception, and cognitive control, and the relationships between these systems. As of 2023, she has produced more than 190 scientific publications, which collectively have been cited over 18,000 times.
The Society for Experimental Psychology and Cognitive Science (SEPCS) (also known as American Psychological Association Division 3; formerly known as the Division of Experimental Psychology and the Division for Theoretical-Experimental Psychology) is a scholarly organization of psychologists in the principal area of general experimental psychology. The goals of this society are to promote, advance, and increase inclusion and exchange of ideas among the scholars in the many subfields of experimental psychology (including but not limited to behavior analysis, psychophysics, comparative, social, developmental, bio/physiological/neuropsychology/behavioral neuroscience, and the many topic areas of cognitive psychology, such as the study of memory, attention, language, intelligence, decision making, and so forth), both in basic and applied research. The society focuses on supporting research through advocacy, training and education, public policy, and outreach. It engages in a wide variety of service work, including leadership in the American Psychological Association's governance.
Suparna Rajaram, SUNY Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Stony Brook University, is an Indian-born cognitive psychologist and expert on memory and amnesia. Rajaram served as Chair of the Governing Board of the Psychonomic Society (2008) and as president of the Association for Psychological Science (2017-2018). Along with Judith Kroll and Randi Martin, Rajaram co-founded the organization Women in Cognitive Science in 2001, with the aim of improving the visibility of contributions of women to cognitive science. In 2019, she was an inaugural recipient of Psychonomic Society's Clifford T. Morgan Distinguished Leadership Award for significant contributions and sustained leadership in the discipline of cognitive psychology.
Rachel Keen is a developmental psychologist known for her research on infant cognitive development, auditory development, and motor control. She is Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Virginia.
F. Gregory Ashby is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Psychological & Brain Sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). He is known for his work in mathematical psychology, cognitive psychology, and cognitive neuroscience.
Clifford Thomas Morgan was an American psychologist whose research was in the fields of physiological and experimental psychology.
