Forthcoming Special Issues
Recollection
Recollection is a topic of critical importance in contemporary views of memory. It refers to the retrieval of specific contextual information from the time of study, and is often characterised as ‘mental time travel’ or as having the first person experience of ‘remembering’. The neuropsychological characterisation of recollection and its neural basis is currently under debate. The topic of this special issue is the neural basis of recollection and the contribution of recollection and similar states to neuropsychological populations and clinically important concepts such as the self, conscious awareness, metacognition, anosognosia and confabulation. The main outcome of the special issue will be a collection of papers which highlight the state of the art in the neural basis recollection, and its status in memory impaired groups. We invite empirical papers considering recollection as studied in patients with acquired brain lesions, normal volunteers, children with typical and atypical development, and in the activation of brain regions and systems as recorded by functional neuroimaging techniques.
Language and the motor system
A number of recent discoveries in the field of neuroscience, such as the observation of mirror neurons, have renewed the interest in the relationship between language and the motor system. The topic has become an area of intense debate, where important neuroscientific and clinical progress has been made on the basis of behavioural, imaging and neuropsychological studies. The main aim of this special issue is to present the state of the art in the field of action-language interactions, highlighting experimental results as well as theoretical perspectives.
Language, computers and cognitive neuroscience
Dramatic advances in computing technology over the last two decades have led to the development of new scientific methods and the theoretical frameworks within which their findings can be interpreted. No scientific field has benefited more from the innovations of the ‘digital age’ than cognitive neuroscience. This Special Issue explores the impact of the digital revolution on the development of quantitative approaches to linguistic and semantic knowledge representation - both normal and pathological - and their relationship to underlying neural systems. These techniques offer scientists and clinicians sensitive assays for empirical and clinical investigations of higher order structural and functional changes in the language domain that would otherwise be difficult to detect in neurological and psychopathological conditions. Computers have also enhanced the volume and availability of digital language data, examination of which is beginning to have importance to fields as diverse as forensic science, literary scholarship and cultural history. We invite contributions relating to novel analytical methods, clinical applications, and structural or functional neuroimaging studies of quantitative linguistic variables. The issue would also welcome submissions that demonstrate the cross-disciplinary potential of these analytical techniques.
Hypnosis: informing the cognitive neuroscience of consciousness
Hypnosis, when combined with current neurophysiological methods and brain imaging techniques, has a growing presence and relevance for cognitive neuroscience research. Interest has focused on how hypnotic suggestion can influence subjective awareness (characterised by alterations in attentional focus, sensation, perception, sense of agency, voluntariness of action, belief and free will) to offer insights into normal and pathological cognitive functioning. The aim of this special issue/section is to bring together for the first time ‘intrinsic’ research, aimed at providing a better understanding of the cognitive components of hypnotic phenomena as well as ‘instrumental’ approaches that employ targeted hypnotic suggestion to investigate directly a range of normal and abnormal psychological processes. This special issue/section will introduce recent behavioural and neuroscientific developments involving hypnosis and illustrate the promising conceptual approach this offers for informing cognitive neuroscience. We invite primarily empirical papers that illustrate the value of both intrinsic and instrumental studies using hypnosis relevant to consciousness studies and cognitive neuroscience.
The clinical neuroanatomy of the occipital lobes
The proposal that cortical visual processing is divisible into distinct dorsal and ventral streams emanating from the striate cortex has helped guide visual neuroscience for nearly thirty years. The model, derived mainly from animal experiments, has proved to be useful also for understanding a wide range of visual symptoms found in clinical disorders. We invite authors to contribute to this special issue dedicated to the 'clinical' anatomy of the occipital lobes and its numerous projections with original work and with focused reviews that emphasize the importance of the anatomy as a means of anchoring clinical, functional, and experimental psychology studies of vision. With this collection of papers we intend to offer a glimpse into the exciting imaging methods available to us that could shed new light on the anatomy of vision and help generate novel hypotheses for further research in this area.
