Bøker av Peter Bright

Neuroimaging methodologies continue to develop at a remarkable rate, providing ever more sophisticated techniques for investigating brain structure and function. The scope of this book is not to provide a comprehensive overview of methods and applications but to provide a 'snapshot' of current approaches using well established and newly emerging techniques. Taken together, these chapters provide a broad sense of how the limits of what is achievable with neuroimaging methods are being stretched.

The rate of technological progress is encouraging increasingly sophisticated lines of enquiry in cognitive neuroscience and shows no sign of slowing down in the foreseeable future. Nevertheless, it is unlikely that even the strongest advocates of the cognitive neuroscience approach would maintain that advances in cognitive theory have kept in step with methods-based developments. There are several candidate reasons for the failure of neuroimaging studies to convincingly resolve many of the most important theoretical debates in the literature. For example, a significant proportion of published functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies are not well grounded in cognitive theory, and this represents a step away from the traditional approach in experimental psychology of methodically and systematically building on (or chipping away at) existing theoretical models using tried and tested methods. Unless the experimental study design is set up within a clearly defined theoretical framework, any inferences that are drawn are unlikely to be accepted as anything other than speculative. A second, more fundamental issue is whether neuroimaging data alone can address how cognitive functions operate (far more interesting to the cognitive scientist than establishing the neuroanatomical coordinates of a given function - the where question).

Modern neuroimaging tools allow unprecedented opportunities for understanding brain neuroanatomy and function in health and disease. Each available technique carries with it a particular balance of strengths and limitations, such that converging evidence based on multiple methods provides the most powerful approach for advancing our knowledge in the fields of clinical and cognitive neuroscience. The scope of this book is not to provide a comprehensive overview of methods and their clinical applications but to provide a "snapshot" of current approaches using well established and newly emerging techniques.