The creation and consolidation of a memory can rest on the integration of any number of possibly disparate features and contexts - colour, sound, arousal, context. How is it that these bind together to form a coherent memory? This book offers an unrivaled overview of one of the most debated hotspots of modern memory research: binding. For all students and researchers in memory, the book will not only embrace their understanding in binding, but will instigate innovative and pioneering ideas for future research.

The Wiley Handbook on the Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory presents a comprehensive overview of the latest, cutting-edge neuroscience research being done relating to the study of human memory and cognition. Features the analysis of original data using cutting edge methods in cognitive neuroscience research Presents a conceptually accessible discussion of human memory research Includes contributions from authors that represent a “who’s who” of human memory neuroscientists from the U.S. and abroad Supplemented with a variety of excellent and accessible diagrams to enhance comprehension

This text offers an overview to one of the most debated hotspots of modern memory research: binding. It supplies readers with an integrative view on binding in memory, fostering insights not only into the processes and their determinants, but also the neural mechanisms enabling these processes.

I. Learning & Memory: Elizabeth Phelps & Lila Davachi (Volume Editors) Topics covered include working memory; fear learning; education and memory; memory and future imagining; sleep and memory; emotion and memory; motivation and memory; inhibition in memory; attention and memory; aging and memory; autobiographical memory; eyewitness memory; and category learning.

A negative effect of the ageing population is that more individuals are experiencing cognitive decline and some form of neurodegenerative disease. With the number of people experiencing dementia likely to double in the next 20 years, this change in society presents one of greatest challenges facing public health personnel in the 21st century. The aim of this volume is to describe research that is in progress, and the major findings that have been obtained in the scientific study of dementia. The chapters in the first section of the book focus upon early signs of dementia, and consider several approaches to finding early cognitive signs and biological markers of dementia. The second section considers whether dementia is inevitable for people who become very old, and features chapters on risk factors and proactive influences, cognitive reserve and intervention. Each chapter in the final section describes phenomena which are related to differences in function between memory systems, including anterograde memory in fronto-temporal dementia, and the role semantic memory and semantic cognition may play in developing an understanding of the development of the degenerative processes in dementia. With contributions from world-class researchers in this area, the volume offers a concise overview of key findings in recent research on dementia and memory. It will be of great interest to researchers and advanced students of cognitive psychology, and to those working in related fields, such as gerontology, rehabilitation sciences, and allied health.

The Mind and Brain are usually considered as one and the same nonlinear, complex dynamical system, in which information processing can be described with vector and tensor transformations and with attractors in multidimensional state spaces. Thus, an internal neurocognitive representation concept consists of a dynamical process which filters out statistical prototypes from the sensorial information in terms of coherent and adaptive n-dimensional vector fields. These prototypes serve as a basis for dynamic, probabilistic predictions or probabilistic hypotheses on prospective new data (see the recently introduced approach of "predictive coding" in neurophilosophy). Furthermore, the phenomenon of sensory and language cognition would thus be based on a multitude of self-regulatory complex dynamics of synchronous self-organization mechanisms, in other words, an emergent "flux equilibrium process" ("steady state") of the total collective and coherent neural activity resulting from the oscillatory actions of neuronal assemblies. In perception it is shown how sensory object informations, like the object color or the object form, can be dynamically related together or can be integrated to a neurally based representation of this perceptual object by means of a synchronization mechanism ("feature binding"). In language processing it is shown how semantic concepts and syntactic roles can be dynamically related together or can be integrated to neurally based systematic and compositional connectionist representations by means of a synchronization mechanism ("variable binding") solving the Fodor-Pylyshyn-Challenge. Since the systemtheoretical connectionism has succeeded in modeling the sensory objects in perception as well as systematic and compositional representations in language processing with this vector- and oscillation-based representation format, a new, convincing theory of neurocognition has been developed, which bridges the neuronal and the cognitive analysis level. The book describes how elementary neuronal information is combined in perception and language, so it becomes clear how the brain processes this information to enable basic cognitive performance of the humans.

The major reference work for a rapidly advancing field synthesizes central themes, reports on current findings, and offers a blueprint for future research. Scientists' attempts to understand the physiology underlying our apprehension of the physical world was long dominated by a focus on the individual senses. The 1980s saw the beginning of systematic efforts to examine interactions among different sensory modalities at the level of the single neuron. And by the end of the 1990s, a recognizable and multidisciplinary field of "multisensory processes" had emerged. More recently, studies involving both human and nonhuman subjects have focused on relationships among multisensory neuronal ensembles and their behavioral, perceptual, and cognitive correlates. The New Handbook of Multisensory Processing synthesizes the central themes in this rapidly developing area, reports on current findings, and offers a blueprint for future research. The contributions, all of them written for this volume by leading experts, reflect the evolution and current state of the field. This handbook does more than simply review the field. Each of the volume's eleven sections broadly surveys a major topic, and each begins with a substantive and thought-provoking commentary by the section editor that identifies the major issues being explored, describes their treatment in the chapters that follow, and sets these findings within the context of the existing body of knowledge. Together, the commentaries and chapters provide an invaluable guide to areas of general agreement, unresolved issues, and topics that remain to be explored in this fast-moving field.