These are changing times—rapidly changing times—for those many people who want to understand what makes human beings tick. What brain changes are responsible for our ability to think, feel, and remember? How are scientists able to pursue these questions? What answers are they finding now? And what are the “big questions” for the next five or ten years?

The new edition of Handbook of Functional Neuroimaging of Cognition presents fourteen concisely written chapters that manage to capture and explain not only what has happened and what is happening in a broad range of the most important cognitive domains in science (e.g., attention, memory, language, emotion, development, skill learning, and aging), but also what will happen in these domains in the future.

This book was written with two types of readers in mind: senior undergraduate and graduate students (and instructors) who want to learn how the rapidly expanding field of cognitive functional neuroimaging is changing the very face of cognitive research; and postdoctoral as well as more established cognitive and social neuroscientists who are experts in a particular domain of cognition who wish to learn both what leading scientists in their research domain see as the current and emerging issues in their field, and who also seek to broaden their understanding across a range of cognitive domains and brain systems.

To facilitate the use by undergraduate and graduate students and instructors, the writing is exceedingly accessible and the chapters have been kept to a length that would be manageable for coverage in one or two lectures. In addition, new chapters on the history of imaging, the physics of functional neuroimaging, and its methodology have been incorporated. For more senior researchers, the chapters in the core cognitive domains have been completely updated from the previous edition to reflect the many new developments that have emerged in the last four to five years; moreover, a number of new chapters have been added to reflect the rapid expansion of functional neuroimaging into a number of new domains, such as skill learning, emotions, and human development.

Most important, the new book has maintained the two fundamental features that made it such a success originally. First, each chapter is written by one or more recognized world leaders in the field. Second, each chapter is divided into three key sections: a background section that introduces the domain being considered, a section that provides a comprehensive examination of what is currently occurring in the research domain, and a final section that explores and considers the major issues that are arising in the area. Thus, both in its individual parts of high-caliber science and in its overall gestalt, the book manages to capture the inherent dynamism that both defines and fuels the field of functional neuroimaging of cognition.