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 Day06/12/2026, 08:11:36 AM

The Retrosplenial Cortex: Where Landmarks Find Their Place on the Map

The retrosplenial cortex (RSC) produces a distinctive navigation deficit: patients recognize every landmark but cannot use any of them to find their way. This article covers RSC anatomy (Brodmann areas 29/30 behind the corpus callosum), the landmark paradox from Maguire's 2001 lesion review, Epstein's 2008 PPA/RSC dissociation showing RSC tracks spatial knowledge of familiar places, the reference-frame translation hypothesis, Park & Chun's 2009 panoramic fMRI result, and why RSC appears in the default mode network alongside spatial memory and future planning.

Cognitive Neuroscience: One Concept a Day06/11/2026, 08:13:35 AM

The Occipital Place Area: Your Brain's Guide to Moving Through Space

Three scene-selective brain regions divide the work of scene perception — the OPA, named in 2013 after TMS evidence gave it a causal role, handles the local elements of visual scenes and the boundary information your brain needs to navigate through immediately visible space. This article covers its anatomy, the fractured-rooms experiment that revealed its local processing bias, the dynamic scenes result linking it to first-person locomotion, and the virtual-reality boundary navigation study that placed it at the perceptual origin of the spatial navigation circuit.

Cognitive Neuroscience: One Concept a Day06/10/2026, 08:16:46 AM

The Fusiform Body Area: The Brain's Neighbor to the FFA

Three millimeters from the fusiform face area sits a completely separate region for perceiving human bodies as wholes — the fusiform body area (FBA). This article explains how Peelen & Downing found it, how Schwarzlose, Baker & Kanwisher named it with high-resolution fMRI, and why it differs fundamentally from the EBA.

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.

Cognitive Neuroscience: One Concept a Day06/08/2026, 08:18:42 AM

The Occipital Face Area: How the Brain's Face Network Actually Works

The face-processing network is not a single area but a three-node system — OFA, FFA, and pSTS. This article explains what the Occipital Face Area is, where it sits in the hierarchy, and why the most striking finding in this literature is that removing it surgically leaves the downstream FFA almost entirely intact.

Cognitive Neuroscience: One Concept a Day06/07/2026, 08:13:02 AM

Prosopagnosia: What Face Blindness Reveals About the Brain's Dedicated Face Module

Prosopagnosia — face blindness — is the strongest neuropsychological evidence that face recognition is a functionally distinct module in the brain. This article covers the two forms (acquired and developmental), the double dissociation argument that separates face recognition from general visual cognition, what lesion anatomy reveals about the processing cascade, the face-specificity debate, and the discovery of super-recognizers at the other end of the distribution.

Cognitive Neuroscience: One Concept a Day06/06/2026, 08:12:46 AM

Retinotopy and the Visual Cortical Hierarchy: How the Brain Maps What You See

In 1995, Martin Sereno and colleagues used fMRI to precisely map — for the first time in living humans — the borders of five distinct visual areas in the occipital cortex. This article explains what retinotopy is, how the hierarchy of visual areas from V1 through MT organizes visual processing, why the fovea commands disproportionate cortical space, and how the two-stream model (ventral 'what' and dorsal 'where/how') has evolved from a clean bifurcation into something considerably messier and more interesting.

Cognitive Neuroscience: One Concept a Day06/05/2026, 08:11:32 AM

The Parahippocampal Place Area: How Your Brain Reads a Room

In 1998, Epstein and Kanwisher identified a cortical region — the PPA — that responds selectively to scenes and spatial layouts, not to faces or isolated objects. This article explains what the PPA computes (scene categorization, not navigation), how it differs from the retrosplenial cortex and the occipital place area, and why the three-scene-systems model overturned a decade of assumptions about what 'place cells in cortex' are really doing.

Cognitive Neuroscience: One Concept a Day06/04/2026, 09:48:28 PM

The Fusiform Face Area: Why Your Brain Has a Dedicated Face-Perception Module

In 1997, Nancy Kanwisher's lab identified a small region of the fusiform gyrus — the FFA — that responds more strongly to faces than virtually anything else. This article unpacks what the FFA is, where it sits, what it actually computes, and why a 2020 finding (blind people have an FFA too) is still rattling assumptions about how the brain organizes itself.

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