Cognitive Neuroscience in China

Abstract

In the last decade, cognitive neuroscience in China has advanced in at least four aspects: first, specialized research institutes and bodies have been set up throughout the nation; second, more and more high-tech research facilities and approaches have been adopted by domestic researchers; third, international conferences on cognitive neuroscience have been held in Mainland China; and finally, publications relating cognitive processes to neural activation and functioning have increased. This paper selectively reviews research on perception and face recognition, attention, language, memory, and disorders in cognitive brain functions carried out by scientists in Mainland China. For visual perception, some excellent work has been carried out to investigate the neural mechanisms of perceptual priming, perceptual grouping, and perception of global/local properties in compound stimuli. For attention, much work is on issues such as the time course of brain activation in selective attention, the patterns of event-related potentials in visual and auditory selective attention, and the effect of pre-cueing on spatial attention. Because the Chinese language has many unique characteristics in phonological and syntactic systems and in the writing system, much research carried out in China takes advantage of these characteristics, trying to separate the universal and language-specific aspects of language processing and their neural correlates. Memory research is mainly at neuropsychological and neurobiological levels. Disorders of cognitive functioning and their underlying impairments in the brain are attracting more and more attention. The paper concludes that as the Chinese economy is growing fast, more resources will be poured into basic research. Thus, systematic research in various fields of cognitive neuroscience by Chinese scientists is no longer a dream. It is reasonable to expect that research in this field will be accelerated in China and become an important force in the world in the near future.