Peter Bright

Anglia Ruskin University United Kingdom

Dr. Peter Bright was educated at the Universities of Surrey (BSc, 1991), Reading (MSc, 1993) and Cambridge (PhD, 1999). His research in the fields of memory and conceptual knowledge are well known. He has held research positions at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge (1994-1995), King’s College London (1998-2001), and the University of Cambridge (2001-2005). He currently holds the position of Reader at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge (since 2005).

Peter Bright

3books edited

Latest work with IntechOpen by Peter Bright

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).

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