Neuroscience is the scientific study of the nervous system, its functions and disorders. It is a multidisciplinary science that combines physiology, anatomy, molecular biology, developmental biology, cytology, psychology, physics, computer science, chemistry, medicine, statistics, and mathematical modeling to understand the fundamental and emergent properties of neurons, glia and neural circuits. The understanding of the biological basis of learning, memory, behavior, perception, and consciousness has been described by Eric Kandel as the "epic challenge" of the biological sciences.
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.
Brenda Milner is a British-Canadian neuropsychologist who has contributed extensively to the research literature on various topics in the field of clinical neuropsychology. Milner is a professor in the Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery at McGill University and a professor of Psychology at the Montreal Neurological Institute. As of 2020, she holds more than 25 honorary degrees and she continued to work in her nineties. Her current work covers many aspects of neuropsychology including her lifelong interest in the involvement of the temporal lobes in episodic memory. She is sometimes referred to as the founder of neuropsychology and has been essential in its development. She received the Balzan Prize for Cognitive Neuroscience in 2009, and the Kavli Prize in Neuroscience, together with John O'Keefe, and Marcus E. Raichle, in 2014. She turned 100 in July 2018 and at the time was still overseeing the work of researchers.
Neuroplasticity, also known as neural plasticity or brain plasticity, is the ability of neural networks in the brain to change through growth and reorganization. It is when the brain is rewired to function in some way that differs from how it previously functioned. These changes range from individual neuron pathways making new connections, to systematic adjustments like cortical remapping or neural oscillation. Other forms of neuroplasticity include homologous area adaptation, cross modal reassignment, map expansion, and compensatory masquerade. Examples of neuroplasticity include circuit and network changes that result from learning a new ability, information acquisition, environmental influences, pregnancy, caloric intake, practice/training, and psychological stress.
Cultural neuroscience is a field of research that focuses on the interrelation between a human's cultural environment and neurobiological systems. The field particularly incorporates ideas and perspectives from related domains like anthropology, psychology, and cognitive neuroscience to study sociocultural influences on human behaviors. Such impacts on behavior are often measured using various neuroimaging methods, through which cross-cultural variability in neural activity can be examined.
Carol A. Barnes is an American neuroscientist who is a Regents' Professor of psychology at the University of Arizona. Since 2006, she has been the Evelyn F. McKnight Chair for Learning and Memory in Aging and is director of the Evelyn F. McKnight Brain Institute. Barnes has been president of the Society for Neuroscience and is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and foreign member of the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2018.
Eleanor Anne Maguire is an Irish neuroscientist. Since 2007, she has been Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London where she is also a Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow.
John O'Keefe, is an American-British neuroscientist, psychologist and a professor at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour and the Research Department of Cell and Developmental Biology at University College London. He discovered place cells in the hippocampus, and that they show a specific kind of temporal coding in the form of theta phase precession. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2014, together with May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser; he has received several other awards. He has worked at University College London for his entire career, but also held a part-time chair at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology at the behest of his Norwegian collaborators, the Mosers.
György Buzsáki is the Biggs Professor of Neuroscience at New York University School of Medicine.
Kay M. Tye is an American neuroscientist and professor and Wylie Vale Chair in the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences. Her research has focused on using optogenetics to identify connections in the brain that are involved in innate emotion, motivation and social behaviors.
Neal J. Cohen is a professor of psychology in the Cognitive Neuroscience division of the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. He is appointed as a full-time faculty member in the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois. He is the founding director of the Center for Nutrition, Learning, and Memory (CNLM), a partnership of the University of Illinois and Abbott Laboratories as of 2011. He is also the founding director of the Interdisciplinary Health Sciences Initiative (IHSI) at the University of Illinois, formed 2014.
In psychology, associative memory is defined as the ability to learn and remember the relationship between unrelated items. This would include, for example, remembering the name of someone or the aroma of a particular perfume. This type of memory deals specifically with the relationship between these different objects or concepts. A normal associative memory task involves testing participants on their recall of pairs of unrelated items, such as face-name pairs. Associative memory is a declarative memory structure and episodically based.
Elizabeth A. Buffalo is the Wayne E. Crill Endowed Professor and Chair of Physiology and Biophysics at the University of Washington School of Medicine and chief of the neuroscience division at the Washington National Primate Research Center. She is known for her research in the field of neurophysiology pertaining to the role of the hippocampus and medial temporal lobe structures in learning and memory and in spatial representation and navigation.
Anne K. Churchland is a neuroscientist at University of California, Los Angeles. Her laboratory studies the function of the posterior parietal cortex in cognitive processes such as decision-making and multisensory integration. One of her discoveries is that individual neurons in rodent posterior parietal cortex can multitask i.e. play a role in multiple behaviors. Another discovery is that rodents are similar to humans in their ability to perform multisensory integration, i.e. to integrate stimuli from two different modalities such as vision and hearing.
Cristina Maria Alberini is an Italian neuroscientist who studies the biological mechanisms of long-term memory. She is a Professor in Neuroscience at the Center for Neural Science in New York University, and adjunct professor at the Departments of Neuroscience, Psychiatry, and Structural and Chemical Biology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York.
Moriel Zelikowsky is a neuroscientist at University of Utah School of Medicine. Her laboratory studies the brain circuits and neural mechanisms underlying stress, fear, and social behavior. Her previous work includes fear and the hippocampus, and the role of neuropeptide Tac2 in social isolation.
Ila Fiete is an Indian–American physicist and computational neuroscientist as well as a Professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences within the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Fiete builds theoretical models and analyses neural data and to uncover how neural circuits perform computations and how the brain represents and manipulates information involved in memory and reasoning.
Kanaka Rajan is a computational neuroscientist in the Department of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School and founding faculty in the Kempner Institute for the Study of Natural and Artificial Intelligence at Harvard University. Rajan trained in engineering, biophysics, and neuroscience, and has pioneered novel methods and models to understand how the brain processes sensory information. Her research seeks to understand how important cognitive functions — such as learning, remembering, and deciding — emerge from the cooperative activity of multi-scale neural processes, and how those processes are affected by various neuropsychiatric disease states. The resulting integrative theories about the brain bridge neurobiology and artificial intelligence.
Aaron David Redish is a Distinguished McKnight University Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Minnesota.
