台大心理系

Accumulating neuroscience evidence supports a systems-level approach to understanding higher cognitive functions. Rather than mapping specific executive functions onto specific brain regions, modern human lesion studies have increasingly applied voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping to elucidate the involvement of distributed brain systems in multiple high-level functions. One key brain network to emerge from contemporary lesion mapping studies is the fronto-parietal network, which is known to play an important role in executive control functions. Prior research indicates that cells in many frontal and parietal regions have highly dynamic response properties, selectively coding information required for goal-directed behavior. This adaptive fronto-parietal representation is believed to serve as a source of bias to other brain systems, guiding the flow of activity along neural pathways that support task-relevant processing. In this talk, I introduce a cognitive neuroscience framework for understanding the contributions of the fronto-parietal network to executive and social cognitive functions, surveying recent lesion mapping studies in humans implicating this network in general intelligence, fluid intelligence, cognitive flexibility, and emotional intelligence. This approach breaks away from the traditional neuroscience view that intellectual functions are localized to a single cortical area, suggesting instead that each cortical region has more than one function, and that functions of distinct areas might overlap with one another to support an integrative architecture for executive, social, and emotional processes. I review emerging neuroscience evidence to elucidate the contributions of fronto-parietal network function to human intelligence, uncovering the executive, social, and emotional foundations of intelligent behavior and their joint contributions to perception, memory, language and thought. I show how this integrative approach advances our understanding of the neural foundations of executive and social cognitive functions ­ motivating new perspectives about how intellectual functions emerge in evolution and development, are cultivated through experience and cognitive training, and are altered through psychiatric illness and neurological disease.