The Cognitive Atlas: Toward a Knowledge Foundation for Cognitive Neuroscience

By Russell A. Poldrack, Aniket Kittur, D. Kalar, Eric Miller, Christian Seppa, Yolanda Gil, D. S. Parker, F. Sabb, Robert M. Bilder. Front. Neuroinform., 2011

403 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Cognitive neuroscience aims to map mental processes onto brain function, which begs the question of what “mental processes” exist and how they relate to the tasks that are used to manipulate and measure them. This topic has been addressed informally in prior work, but we propose that cumulative progress in cognitive neuroscience requires a more systematic approach to representing the mental entities that are being mapped to brain function and the tasks used to manipulate and measure mental processes. We describe a new open collaborative project that aims to provide a knowledge base for cognitive neuroscience, called the Cognitive Atlas (accessible online at http://www.cognitiveatlas.org), and outline how this project has the potential to drive novel discoveries about both mind and brain.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b7c4edc974fc8ab493ca831559dd1b38987a1480

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Citations in the corpus

The OpenNeuro resource for sharing of neuroscience data (2021, positive): “To further characterize this, we searched the text associated with OpenNeuro datasets to identify terms related to psychological concepts and tasks as defined in the Cognitive Atlas ontology ( Poldrack et al., 2011 ).”
From brain maps to cognitive ontologies: informatics and the search for mental structure (2015, background): “For example, by contrasting a condition in which participants passively view visual stimuli with a condition in which participants press a button whenever a new stimulus appears (while holding presentation duration constant across both conditions), one might perhaps be able to cleanly isolate the…”
Towards a Universal Taxonomy of Macro-scale Functional Human Brain Networks (2019, neutral): “Projects such as the “cognitive atlas” (Poldrack et al. 2011) and the “Cognitive Paradigm Ontology” (Turner and Laird 2012) that aim to systematically characterized mental processes provide critical empirical data with which one can begin to delineate task-evoked networks.”
Creativity assessment in psychological research: (Re)setting the standards. (2019, methodology): “, 2006) or the Cognitive Atlas (Poldrack et al., 2011) have tackled similar issues that we are currently facing.”
The Dynamics of Functional Brain Networks: Integrated Network States during Cognitive Task Performance (2015, positive): “, 2000), that likely rely on overlapping, yet distinct, neural architectures (Duncan, 2010; Poldrack et al., 2011).”
Inferring mental states from neuroimaging data: From reverse inference to large-scale decoding (2011, methodology): “For example, in a recent comparison of univariate and multivariate analysis methods in a decision-making task (Jimura and Poldrack, 2011), we found that many regions showed decoding sensitivity using multivariate methods that did not show differences in activation using univariate methods.”
Toward open sharing of task-based fMRI data: the OpenfMRI project (2013, methodology): “The scheme is described in some detail by Poldrack et al. (2011b) and an overview of the current version is shown in Figure 1 .”
Making big data open: data sharing in neuroimaging (2014, methodology): “The Cognitive Atlas is a project that aims to formally describe these psychological processes and their relation to cognitive tasks so that the processes can be uniquely specified in the context of meta-analysis 58 .”
Comparing spatial null models for brain maps (2021, positive): “…to terms that overlapped with those deﬁned in the Cognitive Atlas, an ontological database for deﬁning and relating cognitive processes ( https://www.cognitiveatlas.org/concepts ; Poldrack 2011; Poldrack et al. 2011; Poldrack and Yarkoni 2016 ; refer to Table S1 for a full list of terms).”
Mapping neurotransmitter systems to the structural and functional organization of the human neocortex (2021, methodology): “These terms were selected from the Cognitive Atlas, a public ontology of cognitive science 131 , which includes a comprehensive list of neurocognitive processes.”
Heterochronous laminar maturation in the human prefrontal cortex (2025, unknown): “In accordance with prior work on functional decoding 109,110 , we created meta-analytic maps for 123 psychological terms that were both available in Neurosynth and included in the Cognitive Atlas 111 , an ontology of cognitive neuroscience concepts.”