Standing at the junction of psychology, neuroscience, and biology, cognitive neuroscience seeks to provide brain-based accounts of mental functions such as language, memory, perception, action, emotions, and decision-making. Its emergence as a coherent discipline came about relatively recently through the amalgamation of techniques that had already been in existence (such as research into the effects of brain lesion on cognition, and electrical recordings of the brain) with newly established techniques (principally brain-imaging methods), originally developed for medical diagnostic purposes.

As cognitive neuroscience flourishes as never before, this new title in Psychology Press’s Major Works series, Critical Concepts in Psychology, meets the need for an authoritative reference work to make sense of the subject’s already vast literature and the continuing explosion in research output. Edited by a prominent scholar, and the author of the field’s leading student textbook, Cognitive Neuroscience is a four-volume collection of foundational and contemporary contributions.

The four volumes are divided into eight principal sections: History, Methods, and Key Concepts; Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience; Perception and Attention; Action; Learning and Memory; Language; Executive Functions and Decision-Making; and Emotions and Social Neuroscience. The collection is also fully indexed and has a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editors, which places the collected material in its historical, intellectual, and practical context. It is an essential work of reference and is destined to be valued by scholars and students of cognitive neuroscience as a vital one-stop research tool.