Mapping mental functions onto neural substrates.
10 topics · 13 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Trust, Morality — and Oxytocin?
Paul Zak · 2011
Argues from his own experiments that the hormone oxytocin causally increases trust and generosity between strangers, proposing it as a biological…
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Contributions of the Amygdala to Emotion Processing: From Animal Models to Human Behavior
Elizabeth Phelps & Joseph LeDoux · 2005
Reviews how amygdala circuitry for fear learning, first mapped in rodents, generalises to human emotion and its disorders, and where the animal model…
+4 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Mnemonic Coding of Visual Space in the Monkey's Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex
Shintaro Funahashi, Charles Bruce & Patricia Goldman-Rakic · 1989
Shows single prefrontal neurons fire persistently through the delay of a memory-guided saccade task, giving a cellular mechanism for holding…
+6 more at this level
12 of 13 works
Paul Zak
Argues from his own experiments that the hormone oxytocin causally increases trust and generosity between strangers, proposing it as a biological basis for morality; several of the underlying oxytocin-trust findings have since failed to replicate.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Elizabeth Phelps & Joseph LeDoux
Reviews how amygdala circuitry for fear learning, first mapped in rodents, generalises to human emotion and its disorders, and where the animal model runs out.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Bradley Postle
Argues working memory is not a dedicated brain system but an emergent capacity of sensory, motor and attentional systems recruited to keep information active.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Andy Clark
Argues perception, action and cognition are all instances of one predictive-processing mechanism minimising prediction error, and surveys the objections raised against that unification by peer commentators.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Eleanor Maguire (The Royal Institution)
Argues from hippocampal patients and imaging that the structure which stores the past is the same one used to construct the future, so memory and imagination share a mechanism.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Nancy Kanwisher (MIT OpenCourseWare)
Argues from imaging evidence that the cortex contains regions specialised for particular problems — faces, places, language — and is candid about which claimed modules survive scrutiny.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Shintaro Funahashi, Charles Bruce & Patricia Goldman-Rakic
Shows single prefrontal neurons fire persistently through the delay of a memory-guided saccade task, giving a cellular mechanism for holding information 'online' after the stimulus has disappeared.
Michael Posner & Steven Petersen
Proposes that attention is not one faculty but three anatomically separate networks, alerting, orienting and executive, that can be studied and impaired independently.
Rajesh Rao & Dana Ballard
Models the visual cortex as predicting its own input and forwarding only the error, showing this single principle reproduces extra-classical receptive-field effects that had no other explanation.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Earl Miller & Jonathan Cohen
Argues the prefrontal cortex implements executive control by actively maintaining task-relevant goal representations that bias processing in other brain regions toward the right response.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Camillo Padoa-Schioppa & John Assad
Finds neurons in orbitofrontal cortex that fire in proportion to the subjective value of a chosen good regardless of what the good is, evidence for a common value currency in the brain.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Christopher Frith & Uta Frith
Argues a specific brain network, medial prefrontal cortex and temporoparietal junction, is dedicated to representing other people's mental states, distinct from reasoning about the physical world.
link checked 17 Sept 2026This subject genuinely sits in more than one domain. These fields approach the same ground with different methods.