Strategic Cognitive Sequencing: A Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Approach

Strategic Cognitive Sequencing: A Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Approach

We address strategic cognitive sequencing, the "outer loop" of human cognition: how the brain decides what cognitive process to apply at a given moment to solve complex, multistep cognitive tasks. We argue that this topic has been neglected relative to its importance for systematic reasons but that recent work on how individual brain systems accomplish their computations has set the stage for p...

Computational Cognitive Neuroscience

Cognitive neuroscience was born in the 1990’s amid a technological explosion that produced powerful new methods for noninvasively studying the human brain, including functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). These exciting new technologies revolutionized the scientific study of the mind, giving unprecedented observability into the neural processes...

Impaired Cognitive Flexibility and Intact Cognitive Control in Autism: A Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Approach

In people with autism, the ability to enact a behavior in the presence of competing responses appears intact, while the ability to fluently adapt cognitive control in the face of changing task contingencies is impaired. In this paper, the Cross-Task Generalization model (Rougier et al., 2005), which offers a formal account of the effect of dopamine on frontal cortex function, is used to capture...

How Limited Systematicity Emerges: A Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Approach

Is human cognition best characterized in terms of the systematic nature of classical symbol processing systems (as argued by Fodor & Pylyshyn, 1988), or in terms of the context-sensitive, embedded knowledge characteristic of classical connectionist or neural network systems? We attempt to bridge these contrasting perspectives in several ways. First, we argue that human cognition exhibits the fu...

Computational Explorations in Cognitive Neuroscience