Introduction

Providing the reader with the basic terms and concepts can nevertheless serve as an introduction to cognitive neuroscience and can help the readers’ understanding without consulting additional literature. Cognitive neuroscience embraces those disciplines that investigate the principles of brain function and their relation to mental life. The profile of functional deficits crucially depends on which site of the brain was damaged, supporting the idea that different brain areas are indeed tightly associated with different cognitive functions. One of the most important ideas in cognitive psychology is the concept of a mental representation. A mental representation is a psychological construct. To understand the functional principles of the cognitive system, it is of key importance to define the content of the mental representations, their functional properties, and their deviations from the external world. This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book.