About the Center

The Center for Cognitive Neuroscience (CCN) at Duke University is dedicated to research, education, and training in the psychological, computational, and biological mechanisms of higher mental function in these research areas: perception, attention, memory, language, emotion, motor control, executive functions, consciousness and the evolution of mental processes. Cognitive neuroscience is, by its nature, an interdisciplinary area of research and scholarship, and the Center's faculty, researchers, and students, drawn from several university and medical school departments, reflect this.

The core CCN faculty have office and laboratory space in the Levine Science Research Center (LSRC), a centrally located facility on Duke's East Campus within easy walking distance of university and medical school buildings. The Center consists of 10,000 sq. ft. of space containing new offices and labs designed to meet the specific needs of the faculty, with shared facilities for seminars, meetings, imaging processing, computing, as well as office space for visiting faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and staff. Larger facilities exist in the LSRC for conferences and special invited lectures. Beyond the core faculty, the Center community stays in creative flux, with postdoctoral students, graduate students, visiting students and faculty, and Duke undergrads. In the closely related fields of cognitive neuroscience, neurobiology, philosophy, psychology, biomedical engineering, and computer science, the CCN provides weekly opportunities for dialogue through seminar, lecture, and lunchtime presentation series. The Center also co-sponsors a distinguished lecture series to bring in notable scientists to present their research.

The overall goal of the CCN is to create a vibrant, exciting environment for research and training in cognitive neuroscience that will serve as an intellectual center not only at Duke, but also for the national and international cognitive neuroscience community. As part of that goal, it is of primary importance that we train a new generation of young thinkers capable of understanding the breadth of conceptual and technical approaches to this rapidly growing field of cognitive neuroscience.

The Rationale for Cognitive Neuroscience

In the early 1980s, neuroscientists, neurologists, psychologists, philosophers, computer scientists, and engineers began to consider seriously how knowledge about the fundamental mechanisms of the nervous system could be used to obtain a deeper understanding of the higher mental functions of a variety of animals, humans in particular. Interest in the mechanisms of mental processes, from vision to consciousness, were, of course, always key aspects of modern biological and behavioral sciences, but most of the growth of neuroscience in the last half of the twentieth century focused on mechanisms of neural function at the level of the molecular and cellular processes in neuronal signaling, synaptic transmission, signal transduction, and neural development. Because of these highly successful efforts to understand the elementary principles of nervous system function, less effort was devoted to understanding the basis of human cognition in biological terms, and the most influential work in this period was unquestionably derived from mainstream psychology. The cognitive neuroscience revolution during the last two decades is an expression of what many see as the next logical step in neuroscience. The vision of the CCN at Duke reflects this evolution.

Neuroscience at Duke

Duke has made a special commitment to developing neuroscience over the last decade, most recently in the domain of cognitive neuroscience. The university has done so with significant resources and much energy, as signified by the creation of the CCN, the Brain Imaging and Analysis Center (BIAC), and the Center for Neuroengineering. In fact, Duke has already dedicated 12 new tenure-track faculty lines to this enterprise and tens of millions of dollars to infrastructural development. This broad initiative began in the late 1980s when diverse groups on campus militated for the creation of a Department of Neurobiology, which was established in 1990 in the newly constructed Bryan Building for Research in Neurobiology. In 1998 the Brain Imaging and Analysis Center (BIAC) was founded under Director Greg McCarthy, with the aim of adding state-of-the-art human imaging facilities to foment research in this critical area. And in 1999, the Provost, together with the Office of the President, the Dean of Arts and Sciences, and the Trustees of the University, established the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. This was the last piece needed to represent the full range of neuroscience at Duke, and its ongoing purpose is to promote interdisciplinary work in mind, brain and behavior that could draw on the strengths of the Department of Neurobiology, the BIAC and the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences (PBS).

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