Cognitive, Social and Affective Neuroscience

The Section “Cognitive, Social and Affective Neuroscience” addresses foundational inquiries in cognitive processes, social perception, and emotion alongside their practical applications across various levels of analysis, including behavior, neural circuits, cellular mechanisms, and genetics. Our overarching objective is to cultivate an integrative, interdisciplinary platform that amalgamates psychology, neuroscience, cognitive science, linguistics, computer science, and engineering. This platform highlights and propels new theories, innovative methodologies, and techniques in examining cognitive, social, and affective processes, emphasizing their interconnections and reciprocal influences across normal development, age-related cognitive changes, neurocognitive disorders, and psychiatric conditions. For example, linguistic theories that traditionally compartmentalize language, emotion, and cognition as independent entities, often overlooking the socio-cultural context of linguistic behavior, may struggle to inform and guide research and practices in communication and social interaction, including healthy and clinical populations.

This Section enthusiastically welcomes state-of-the-art basic, clinical, and translational investigations utilizing a spectrum of methodologies, including behavioral assessments, neuroimaging, computational modeling, pharmacological interventions, and neuromodulation techniques. Our aim is to advance comprehension of brain-behavior relationships, primarily focusing on the foundations and interactions of cognitive, social, and affective processes across the lifespan. We encourage submissions of original research and reviews, theoretical treatises, meta-analyses, case studies, observational approaches, technical insights, computer simulations and models, statistical methodologies, perspectives, and commentaries.

Key areas of interest include (but are not confined to) the following:

• Aging and cognitive decline;
• Animal models;
• Attention and unconscious processes;
• Auditory and visual perception;
• Cognitive development;
• Computational modeling;
• Decision-making;
• Emotion regulation;
• Empathy;
• Executive function;
• Individual differences;
• Intervention and neuromodulation approaches;
• Learning and memory;
• Mental health and psychiatric conditions/disorders;
• Motivation;
• Multisensory processing;
• Neurocognitive disorders;
• Neuroendocrine methodologies;
• Sensorimotor integration and binding;
• Social behavior and cognitive processes;
• Social robotics;
• Speech and language.