30 years of cognitive shifts

Brains are complex structures that can accomplish more than the sum of their parts. Similarly, the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition (CNBC) leverages a collaborative approach to bring fresh perspectives to understanding the neural mechanisms that give rise to human cognitive abilities.

A joint program between Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh, the CNBC was founded in 1994 as a center for interdisciplinary neuroscience.

“Understanding the brain and cognition is one of the most fundamental problems for human society and academia,” said Matthew Smith, CNBC co-director and a professor of biomedical engineering and neuroscience at Carnegie Mellon. “To solve it, we need to draw from all the backgrounds and skills of the disciplines that have come before us. That’s where the interdisciplinary approach comes in. The task is so challenging, we must take the different perspectives that we've developed over time and integrate them.”

The center integrates Carnegie Mellon’s strengths in psychology, computer science, engineering, biological sciences, and statistics with Pitt’s strengths in bioengineering, math, psychology, and basic and clinical neuroscience. The result is a community of researchers who stretch beyond traditional boundaries to innovate new methods to understand the neural basis of cognition.

“It creates a scholarly community that connects people across departments, institutions, disciplines, and research methods in a way that is unusual for a lot of centers,” said Julie Fiez, professor of psychology at Pitt and CNBC co-director. “If you can bring folks together and leverage multiple ways to tackle the same question, that’s great. Each method has its limitations, so if you can address your question from multiple angles, you can gain more answers and innovation.”

Expanding influence

Over the past three decades, CNBC researchers have made an impact across the spectrum of neuroscience, from foundational scientific research aimed at understanding how individual neurons behave to studies that led to the discovery of important cognitive consequences of brain injury. Other researchers focused on diseases and disorders such as Alzheimer’s and autism. 

“The CNBC really expanded my horizons and thinking about how to answer a complicated question like memory,” said Alison Barth, a professor of life sciences at CMU. “It is a real high point of my time at Carnegie Mellon.”

Barth investigates how learning and experiences change the brain. She examines how mice encode sensory information from their whiskers and how the connections between neurons alter based on that information. She collaborates with other CNBC researchers to use calcium imaging to track neuron populations, enabling her lab to find the same cells over multiple days of testing.

While Barth is interested in memory, Avniel Ghuman, associate professor of neurological surgery at Pitt, is interested in vision and investigates how humans recognize faces and facial expressions. Some of the data he collects comes from patients with seizures who have electrodes implanted. He uses that data to study how vision works in a more natural environment than a lab. Guhman works with other researchers with related interests, including Fiez, to study the high-quality data collected from implanted electrodes.

“The CNBC has been a unifying thread,” Ghuman said. “One of the things that’s kind of remarkable about Pittsburgh is the absolute strength and variety of neuroscience research. We’ve got a lot going on for a city this size.”

Kate Hong, assistant professor of biological sciences at Carnegie Mellon, said she was drawn to CMU in part because of “the openness and collaborative infrastructure of the Pittsburgh neuroscience community that CNBC has helped build.”

Hong studies how sensory processes in the brain guide everyday behavior. She works with other CNBC researchers to create tools that can help analyze the connections between brain areas.

The ongoing collaborations among CNBC researchers are extensive.

“What the CNBC really enables is not just collaborative spirit but the resources and opportunities to talk to each other,” said Jana Kainerstorfer, professor of biomedical engineering at Carnegie Mellon, who develops devices to measure changes in brain activity.

What the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition really enables is not just collaborative spirit, but the resources and opportunities to talk to each other.

Jana Kainerstorfer, Professor, Biomedical Engineering

To facilitate these collaborations, the CNBC regularly hosts meetings for professors, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students studying different topics in cognition from sensation and perception to Parkinson’s disease. Caroline Runyan, associate professor of neuroscience at Pitt, studies how the cortex, the brain’s outer area, is implicated in sensation and perception. Through some of these meetings, she was able to meet other researchers she collaborates with, including Smith.

“One of the really cool things about the CNBC is the multi-lab interactions that are ongoing and regular, where many different labs get together and present their data to teach other,” Runyan said. “As the community continues to grow, I’m really excited to see how our work goes forward together.”

The CNBC also provides resources to advance science. For example, researchers at Pitt and CMU were very interested in magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in the early ’90s. Designed to measure changes in blood flow to different areas of the brain, researchers saw it as a breakthrough to identify which parts of the brain were implicated in different cognitive functions. The CNBC has helped establish multiple cross-institutional imaging centers, including the CMU-Pitt BRIDGE center in Mellon Institute, which opened in 2018.

Foundational insights

The CNBC has been focused on interdisciplinary collaboration since its conception. In 1989, Walt Schneider, professor of psychology at Pitt; and Jay McClelland, professor of psychology and cognitive neuroscience at Carnegie Mellon at the time, piloted a small joint program between Carnegie Mellon and Pitt focused on interdisciplinary graduate training in cognitive neuroscience and collaboration between computer scientists, neuroscientists, and psychologists. During weekly pizza nights, faculty and graduate students would present research and share ideas.

“In the first presentation, you could always tell which discipline they were from because they got their discipline right, and they got a bunch of other things not so good,” Schneider said. “After they’d been in the program, you couldn’t tell which discipline they were in. They had learned to communicate across the disciplinary silos successfully.”

A key mission of the CNBC then and now is training students to be interdisciplinary scientists by offering core courses to establish a capability to communicate and work together across disciplines.

In 1994, the R.K. Mellon Foundation provided $16 million to create the CNBC. It became the first center of its kind in terms of university collaboration, interdisciplinary science and cognitive science. Over the past three decades since that initial funding, the CNBC has directly received numerous prestigious grants including from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Hillman Foundation, and the Simons Foundation.

New branch of brain science

As the CNBC grew, so did interest in neuroscience, especially at Carnegie Mellon. Barbara Shinn-Cunningham came to the CNBC as co-director in 2018 and was charged with broadening Carnegie Mellon’s neuroscience efforts. Inspired by programs at Carnegie Mellon and Pitt that were designed for students to get a more interdisciplinary view of cognitive neuroscience, she helped launch the Neuroscience Institute and serves as its founding director. By building upon Carnegie Mellon’s historic strengths in technology and machine learning, the Neuroscience Institute has crystallized Carnegie Mellon’s neuroscience efforts while integrating with the broader CNBC community.

“Most of the pieces were already in place because of the CNBC,” said Shinn-Cunningham, who is also a professor of auditory neuroscience, biomedical engineering, psychology, and electrical and computer engineering. “The strong cross-institutional CNBC community is a huge draw when recruiting neuroscientists at every level. The collaborations are critical to everything we do.”

The Neuroscience Institute supports neuroscience research across the university while sitting jointly in the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences and the Mellon College of Science. A critical part of the institute’s mission is its symbiotic relationship with the CNBC, even providing core funding to enable CNBC activities.

“I don’t know a single neuroscientist at CMU who doesn’t have some collaboration with Pitt,” Shinn-Cunningham said. “I have as many collaborators at Pitt as I do at CMU. That community is enormously important for the intellectual health and richness of the neuroscience work.”

Developing scientific talent

Training the next generation of researchers to reach beyond their traditional disciplinary silos has been a key tenet of the CNBC’s mission beginning when faculty and graduate students started gathering for those weekly pizza nights to present research and share ideas.

Peter Strick, professor and chair of neurobiology at Pitt, said they aimed to treat students as professionals who were capable of making fundamental contributions.

“Students had the opportunity to make discoveries from day one and were provided with the proper mentoring, guidance, environment, and resources,” Strick said.

The training includes core courses to establish a capability to communicate and work together across disciplines.

David Touretzky, professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon, teaches one of the core courses, Computational Models of Neural Systems. Students receive an overview of anatomy, physiology, and mathematical models.

“This is the course I wish I could’ve taken when I was in grad school,” Touretzky said. “It’s designed to be accessible both to neuroscience majors who have limited computing skills and to computer scientists who in some cases have no prior neuroscience knowledge.”

Another core course is Cognitive Neuroscience. Developed by Carl Olson, professor of neuroscience and biological sciences, the class offers students an overview of the basis of cognition in the brain.

Along with dedicated coursework, students select a CNBC mentor from Carnegie Mellon or Pitt, regardless of their home institution, which offers more opportunities for research and advice. They also have access to grants through the CNBC that allow them to pursue research topics they are most passionate about.

“For doctoral students and postdocs, this is a particularly special environment for training where there’s tremendous access to disciplines and areas of research that are far beyond what they can get from one lab environment,” Smith said.

From 1995 through 2023, the center trained 381 graduate students, many of whom went into research or academia. New educational offerings have been added, such as programs in neural computation, multimodal neural imaging training, brain and behavior, and neurobiology of disease.

Michael Tarr, professor of cognitive and brain science, joined as the Carnegie Mellon CNBC co-director in 2009 and served until 2014. Along with Nathan Urban, the subsequent co-director, they helped develop a neuroscience degree for undergraduates at Carnegie Mellon.

“It was a really important contribution in terms of building a modern program for understanding the mind and brain,” Tarr said. “Most of the CNBC faculty are involved in teaching courses relevant to the major.”

Undergraduate students from Carnegie Mellon, Pitt, and beyond also can learn about cognitive research through the Summer Undergraduate Research Program in Computational Neuroscience. For 10 weeks, faculty mentor students and oversee research projects from a group of local students, as well as a cohort visiting from their home institutions for the summer.

Thinking toward the future

Since the CNBC was established, the center and the field of cognitive neuroscience have both grown, partially thanks to student training. Smith and Fiez now are preparing for the next 30 years. They said they plan to increase both the number of CNBC researchers and the number of students who learn from them.

Schneider is proud of what has become of the collaboration he and McClelland began. He said as technology advances, researchers at the CNBC will have the opportunity to answer core questions about cognition that have existed since the creation of cognitive neuroscience.

“When the CNBC was founded, the field of cognitive science almost didn’t exist,” Schneider said. “I’m hopeful that in the decades ahead, we continue to understand human biological intelligence, that we increase the capability that we have within artificial systems, and we continue to get better and detailed interpretations of neural systems.”