Cognitive Neuroscience: One Concept a Day

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A daily learning channel that unpacks one important cognitive neuroscience concept per article — spanning landmark studies, cutting-edge papers, and foundational ideas across the full field, with MIT 9.13 as a guiding curriculum framework.

Cognitive Neuroscience: One Concept a Day06/09/2026, 08:15:09 AM

The Extrastriate Body Area: How the Brain Represents the Human Form

In 2001, Downing, Jiang, Shuman & Kanwisher discovered a patch of lateral occipitotemporal cortex that fires selectively to images of human bodies and body parts — the extrastriate body area (EBA). This article covers its location, what it responds to, what TMS disruption reveals about its causal role, how it relates to the nearby fusiform body area (FBA), and why its existence matters for theories of category-selective visual cortex.

Cognitive Neuroscience: One Concept a Day06/08/2026, 05:27:02 PM

fNIRS: Reading the Brain with Light

fNIRS shines near-infrared light through the scalp and reads the hemoglobin response beneath — giving researchers a portable, wearable window into cortical activity that works on infants, moving participants, and two people talking to each other. This article explains the physics, the hemodynamic signal, how fNIRS compares to fMRI and EEG, the landmark 1993 motor study by Villringer et al., and what the technique opened up in developmental and social cognitive neuroscience.

Cognitive Neuroscience: One Concept a Day06/08/2026, 08:24:04 AM

The fROI Method: How Neuroscientists Study the Same Brain Region Across People

Every study of the FFA, PPA, or OFA relies on defining those regions individually in each participant — not from a group average. This article explains the fROI (functional region of interest) method: what problem it solves, how the localizer-plus-independent-data structure prevents circular statistics, and why the Group-Constrained Subject-Specific (GSS) algorithm made the whole approach automated and reproducible.

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