Reactions to The Student's Guide to Cognitive Neuroscience
"The last couple of decades have seen an explosion of papers on cognitive neuroscience, but basic textbooks have been scarce. Although many books are aimed at readers who understand the basics of neuroscience, anyone who has taught a cognitive neuroscience course will have struggled to find a single textbook that covers the breadth of the topic at the right level. The Student's Guide to Cognitive Neuroscience lives up to its title and ... does an excellent job of filling this gap.
Unusually for a textbook, this volume is small and light enough to be easily carried around, and the format encourages dipping into different chapters. Read from beginning to end, the book would form an excellent basis for a cognitive neuroscience course. A selection of chapters would work equally well as part of a larger neuroscience or psychology course.
The book begins with a brief introduction to cognitive neuroscience, which the author wisely grounds in a historical perspective. This description of the emergence of cognitive neuroscience as it is currently understood is illuminating even for those of us who have been in the field for years but who may not be familiar with the philosophical arguments that have shaped current thinking in the field ... the book really comes into its own in the three chapters on the methods of cognitive neuroscience (EEG, MEG, brain imaging and patient studies). The author's expertise in these methods is clear. The chapter on functional imaging, for example, is excellent, explaining the technique, analysis methods and-perhaps most importantly-experimental design very well. The application of these techniques is demonstrated with case studies from the literature, showing how an experiment could be designed to answer a research question and how the results could be interpreted. Any student going on to do a functional imaging study would have a clear understanding of the issues that need to be thought through beforehand.
This section also includes a spirited defense of single-patient case studies as well as a primer on transcranial magnetic stimulation. The latter is again excellent.
The Student's Guide to Cognitive Neuroscience is unique in that there are no comparable textbooks aimed at this level, and it does an excellent job of providing a solid grounding in this broad field. With luck, some of the students introduced to the field by this textbook will go on to make their own contribution to cognitive neuroscience."
Charvy Narain, Nature Neuroscience (pp1079, Vol 9, Number 9, September 2006)
"This is a terrific book. It is timely, up-to-date, written in a lively and engaging style and full of helpful guides and illustrations. It is particularly useful in including chapters on methods as well as on more traditional topic areas, in integrating work from neuropsychology with electrophysiological and imaging studies, and in covering social and emotional processes as well as cognitive processing."
Glyn Humphreys, Professor of Cognitive Psychology, University of Birmingham
"Jamie Ward has done a great service to the neuroscience community: he has written an easy to read, enjoyable introduction to cognitive neuroscience that will attract many students to the discipline. The concepts, results and methods of basic neuroscience, clinical neuropsychology, neuroimaging and cognitive pyschology are explained in simple direct language; many examples and illustrations bring the sciences of the mind and brain to life. Perhaps the best feature of the book is the seamless weaving of the various research areas that jointly define cognitive neuroscience into a coherent whole. I will certainly use this book for my courses."
Professor Alfonso Caramazza, the Cognitive Neuropsychology Laboratory, Harvard University