The Interface Between Neuroscience and Psychological Science

Neuroscience and psychological science have a long history of mutual interest and influence. Yet, while neuroscientists played a critical role in the founding of psychological science (Gardner, 1984), throughout much of the first century of experimental psychology, neuroscience was relegated to a relatively minor role. At the same time, the sophisticated psychological models developed during this period were often overlooked by neuroscientists seeking to understand how the brain gives rise to thought and behavior.

Exciting developments over the past two decades have changed all of this. For example, the founding of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society in 1992 marked an emerging perspective that neuroscientific approaches can play a central role in psychological theorizing, and over the past 15 years the complementary power of neuroscientific evidence has been increasingly apparent. At the same time, one need only attend the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience to appreciate the fundamental role that psychological theory now plays in advancing neuroscience.

Another way to assess how things have changed is to examine the evolution in the fields' textbooks over this period. For example, in its first edition in 1980, John Anderson's Cognitive Psychology and Its Implications (Anderson, 1980) contained few references to the neuroscience literature and limited discussion of how neuroscience data might inform psychological theorizing. The contrast with the 2005 edition (Anderson, 2005) is striking, as this newest edition has a rendering of Brodmann's map of brain areas on the inside cover, and nearly every chapter has substantial discussion of neuroscience data and its relation to psychological processes. Consideration of one of neuroscience's canonical texts, Principles of Neural Science by Kandel, Schwartz, and Jessell (2000), reveals a similar transformation, with increasing integration of psychological models.

Technological developments have propelled the increased cross-fertilization between neural and psychological science. For example, when we were beginning graduate students in the early 1990s, the central methods available to cognitive neuroscientists studying humans were behavioral studies, computational modeling, electroencephalography, and patient studies. However, during our time as students, the field rapidly shifted with the development and dissemination of functional neuroimaging techniques, particularly functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Researchers now had the ability to non-invasively characterize the neural correlates of psychological processes with high spatial resolution. Since the development of fMRI in the early 1990s, its adoption has been nothing less than explosive; from 9 papers in 1993 1 to 2,139 papers in 2007, the growth of publications using fMRI has closely followed an exponential function and shows no evidence of slowing down.

The aim of this special issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science is to highlight just how intimate the dialog between psychological and neural science has become. The papers in this special issue demonstrate the breadth with which neuroscientific methods and data have penetrated psychology, as well as the ways in which psychological theory has served to foster neuroscientific advances. From these articles, it is apparent how the interplay between neuroscience and psychological science has produced new insights into fundamental theoretical problems and at the same time has highlighted new questions that await answers.