Cognition: neurobiological correlates and dynamics

Human brain constructs knowledge, elaborates thought and promotes goal-directed behavior, organizing memories of past experience and information from the environment, perceived by senses. Cognition entails all these mental processes. Neuroscience has attempted to explore the architecture of cognition, whose neurobiological substrates are provided by widely distributed neural networks, interacting through complex connections, including sensory-fugal (inward or forward) and sensory-petal (outward or backward) projections, running in opposite direction. The iterative dialogue between inward circuits (conveying information that reflect the physical nature of perceptive stimuli) and outward ones (inferring the nature of percepts based on empirical accounts of past experiences) allows the unimodal (modality-selective) and multimodal/supramodal elaboration of sensory information. Moreover, top-down projections from high-order associative cortices confer the ability to transcend experience-based representations, promoting individually-sculpted interpretations, as well as mental imagery, thought, and abstraction.