The lecture focused on the role of brain imaging in cognitive psychology.
Historically, cognitive psychology has relied primarily on the behavioral sciences. By analyzing participants' responses, errors and reaction times (mental chronometry), in tasks designed to separate different models of the architecture of a cognitive task, cognitive psychologists attempt to infer the organization of mental representations and information processing algorithms in adults, children and animals.
The use of human brain imaging is often misunderstood. Some claim that its sole purpose is to locate, in the brain, the cerebral bases of cognitive functions whose existence and functional organization have already been established by behavioral methods. Neuroimaging is thus no more than an elaborate form of "neo-phrenology".
Contrary to this simplistic view, the lecture set out to show, through numerous examples, how the various methodologies that make up functional neuroimaging make it possible to ask questions of functional organization that go far beyond mere localization, and fall squarely within the purview of psychology. Neuroimaging represents an opportunity for the psychologist insofar as it gives access to cognitive mechanisms in a more direct way. Behavioral studies, such as those based on reaction time, summarize a series of processing steps in a single measure. Examining the state of activity of a brain structure provides a more differentiated set of measures, each of which can constitute a relatively pure index of a processing stage. Neuroimaging thus provides new answers to some of the major objectives of cognitive psychology, notably :
- breaking down cognitive tasks into subsystems or "modules" ;
- measuring the temporal course of cognitive operations;
- analyzing the internal organization of mental representations.