Table 1.
Cognitive functions
| Cognitive function | Description | Involved neural regions |
|---|---|---|
| Attention and consciousness | Attention is the ability to choose and concentrate on relevant stimuli. Attention function correlates significantly with cognitive control or executive control (Mackie et al. 2013). Consciousness is a self-sustaining process with varying in vigilance and arousal, and a precondition to putting voluntary control on behavior. Attention is different from consciousness but strictly related to consciousness (Nani et al. 2019; Tallon-Baudry 2011) | The attention mainly activates sensory regions, and attentional control focuses on the posterior parietal cortex (lateral intraparietal area, superior parietal lobule) and prefrontal cortex (frontal eye field, and supplementary eye field, superior colliculus) (Yantis 2008), as well as dorsolateral prefrontal cortical regions (Sarter et al. 2001) |
| Working memory | Working memory is a cognitive system with a limited capacity that can maintain information provisionally. Working memory is important for reasoning and the guidance of decision-making and behavior (Eriksson et al. 2015). Multiple behavioral and health elements contribute to working memory (Moser et al. 2018) | Working memory can activate the fronto-parietal cortices and subcortices, such as the midbrain and cerebellum (Chai et al. 2018; Eriksson et al. 2015; Moser et al. 2018) |
| Learning and memory | Learning means to acquire new information or knowledge, it aims to memorize the info and knowledge. Learning & memory execute on three basic phases including encoding (acquisition and consolidation), storage, and retrieval (Gazzaniga et al. 2019). Short-term memory (STM) is different from long-term memory (LTM). STM (primary memory) is merely a temporary and short-lasting conscious maintenance while LTM (secondary memory) is maintained by stable and permanent changes in neural connections spread through the brain, including consolidation and storage (Brem et al. 2013) | The different aspects of learning and memory involve different brain systems, but the cerebellum, hippocampus, and amygdala play indispensable roles in the processes of learning and memory (Thompson and Kim 1996) |
| Sensation & Perception | Sense-perception is to select and identify information from the environment by sensory receptors—sense organs, such as eyes, nose, tongue, hands, and skin (Mesulam 1998; Morenko 2014). The sensorimotor contingencies (SCs) differentiate sensation from perception. If SC is determined by the feature of the visual appearance itself, it thus is taken for sensation. If SC is resolved by visual attributes, it is deemed as perception (O'Regan and Noë 2001) | The neural regions involved in sensory and perceptive processing are complex and transmodal. After haptic inputs are transferred into neural biological signals are sent through the thalamus to the primary somatosensory cortex for further processing (shown as Fig. 5) (Privitera 2020) |
| Speech & Language | Language is made up of social rules including semantics or meanings, make-new-word, grammar, and social context; while speech is the verbal means of communicating involving articulation, voice, fluency, and prosody. Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area are the primary neural regions, as well as angular gyrus and insula (Blank et al. 2002; Romeo et al. 2018) | Language is processed through two distinct pathways, i.e. the dorsal and the ventral stream, to realize phonological and semantic processing. Phonological processing is mainly made with the superior longitudinal fasciculus of the dorsal stream, while semantic processing is done dominantly with the ventral stream including inferior fronto-occipital fasciculus and the intra-temporal networks. Speech is probably related to the frontal aslant tract (Fujii et al. 2016) |
| Emotion | Emotion emerges when livings make sense of sensory inputs from the body and the world using empirical knowledge (Lindquist et al. 2012). Positive or negative emotion is activated in the left or right hemisphere that is in dispute. The asymmetry of emotional processing is still on the way (Alves et al. 2008) | Emotion is implemented by amygdale and affects cognition (e.g., perception, attention, memory, and decision-making), vice versa (Brosch et al. 2013; Gray et al. 2002; Salzman and Fusi 2010). Their relationship tie is the anterior cingulated cortex (Stevens et al. 2011) |
| Object identification | Object identification is the ability of discerning objects via a series of reflexive feedforward computations in the brain (DiCarlo et al. 2012). The invariant object recognition (relying on view-invariant diagnostic features) can be achieved by the human brain, not by advanced machine vision methods (Karimi-Rouzbahani et al. 2017; Roldan 2017) | Object recognition will fire the neural regions including mainly mid-temporal and temporopolar cortices, and right frontal regions, and the left occipitotemporal cortex which can speed up the prediction of objects (Rizkallah et al. 2018) |
| Executive control | Executive functions (EFs) are a set of cognitive processes that are necessary for the cognitive control of behavior to complete the chosen goals | EFs are located primarily in the frontal, parietal, and cerebellar. Temporal lobes are only related to EFs for the patient with dementia (Nowrangi et al. 2014) |
| Social cognition | Social cognition in humans characterizes psychological processes that permit us to infer or determine others’ imminent mental states (Adolphs 2009) | Social cognition depends on the medial prefrontal cortex, superior temporal sulcus, temporal-parietal junction, and precuneus, and attributes to affect social decision-makers (Lee and Harris 2013) |