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| ARTICLE | |
Independent Component Analysis of Event-Related PotentialsDavid M. Groppe, Scott Makeig, Marta Kutas
Department of Cognitive Science,
Independent component analysis (ICA) is a potentially powerful tool for analyzing event-related potentials (ERPs), one of the most popular measures of brain function in cognitive neuroscience. Based on the statistics of the electroencephalogram (EEG), from which ERPs are derived, ICA may be able to extract multiple, functionally distinct sources of an ERP generated by disparate regions of cerebral cortex. Extracting such sources greatly increases the informativeness of ERPs by providing a cleaner, less ambiguous measure of source activity and by facilitating the identification of this activity across different experimental paradigms. The main purpose of this review article is to explain the logic of ICA, to illustrate how ICA could in principle extract spatiotemporally overlapping ERP sources, and to review evidence that ICA is a well motivated methodology that can extract latent ERP sources in practice. In addition, we close the article by noting potential problems with ICA and by comparing it to three alternative methods for extracting ERP sources/components: spatial principal component analysis, source localization, and temporal principal component analysis.
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| ARTICLE | |
Conversations on Cognitivism and the Study of LanguageJonathan Nelson
Department of Cognitive Science
A long time ago, in the 1950s, the world of the social sciences was dominated by a fruitless paradigm
known as behaviorism. The evil Burrhus Frederic Skinner was its champion, and he banned from the face of the earth
all discussion of concepts, ideas, meaning, or mental entities of any sort. Then came Noam Chomsky, the epic linguist
and father of cognitive science, who demonstrated the heretofore unseen complexity in human speech. Chomsky had
the polemic ability to topple the behaviorist machine, and since Chomsky has come on the scene the study of language
has blossomed, and with it our awe of the human mind.1 Chomsky's students, largely following in his tradition, and
his antagonists alike, have found their research largely choreographed by his ideas, as they have opened whole new
areas of linguistic inquiry. This story, of course, is simplified and exaggerated. Suppose we want to make sense of it.
What should we do? We might sit down Noam Chomsky and B. F. Skinner, and have them chat about language and
the validity of cognitive inquiry. An alternate approach would be to interview Chomsky and Skinner individually,
possibly with selected younger scholars of language. Here, based on writings of selected scholars and interviews with
them, I attempt to get a feel for the history and sociology of the recent study of language.
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| ARTICLE | |
A chat with computational neuroscientist Terrence SejnowskiTerry Sejnowski is one of the world's foremost theoretical neuroscientists and a pioneer in the field of computational neuroscience. He is currently a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, the Francis Crick Professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies where he directs the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory, and a Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of California San Diego, where he heads the Institute for Neural Computation.Download this article
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