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. 2011 Sep 6:5:17.
doi: 10.3389/fninf.2011.00017. eCollection 2011.

The cognitive atlas: toward a knowledge foundation for cognitive neuroscience

Russell A Poldrack  1 , Aniket Kittur, Donald Kalar, Eric Miller, Christian Seppa, Yolanda Gil, D Stott Parker, Fred W Sabb, Robert M Bilder
Affiliations

The cognitive atlas: toward a knowledge foundation for cognitive neuroscience

Russell A Poldrack et al. Front Neuroinform. .

Abstract

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.

Keywords: cognitive science; informatics; neuroimaging; ontology.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
An overview of the database schema for representation of mental concepts in the Cognitive Atlas. Blue boxes reflect external ontologies, and dashed lines reflect class inheritance, while solid lines reflect ontological relations.
Figure 2
Figure 2
An overview of the database schema for representation of mental tasks in the Cognitive Atlas. Blue boxes reflect external ontologies, and dashed lines reflect class inheritance, while solid lines reflect ontological relations. The dashed line connecting activation maps to imaging databases is meant to reflect an empirical relation, as these databases do not currently expose formal ontologies.
Figure 3
Figure 3
A screenshot of the disambiguation page for the concept of “behavioral inhibition,” which points to two separate senses of the term.
Figure 4
Figure 4
The Cognitive Atlas provides a framework for relating biological functions and processes to psychiatric symptoms and syndromes. The links between each level in this graph reflect proposed empirical relations; the strength of each link (noted by its width) is proportional to the literature association between each set of terms (defined as the Jaccard coefficient between the two search terms derived from PubMed). Each link can also be associated with specific empirical results, as noted in the box demonstrating a particular annotation for one of the edges.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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