Brain and cognitive sciences

Cognitive flexibility is an intrinsic property of a cognitive system often associated with the mental ability to adjust its activity and content, switch between different task rules and corresponding behavioral responses, maintain multiple concepts simultaneously and shift internal attention between them.
The term cognitive flexibility is traditionally used to refer to one of the executive functions.
In this sense, it can be seen as neural underpinnings of adaptive and flexible behavior.
Most flexibility tests were developed under this assumption several decades ago.
Nowadays, cognitive flexibility can also be referred to as a set of properties of the brain that facilitate flexible yet relevant switching between functional brain states.

Cognitive neuropsychology is a branch of cognitive psychology that aims to understand how the structure and function of the brain relates to specific psychological processes.
Cognitive psychology is the science that looks at how mental processes are responsible for the cognitive abilities to store and produce new memories, produce language, recognize people and objects, as well as our ability to reason and problem solve.
Cognitive neuropsychology places a particular emphasis on studying the cognitive effects of brain injury or neurological illness with a view to inferring models of normal cognitive functioning.
Evidence is based on case studies of individual brain damaged patients who show deficits in brain areas and from patients who exhibit double dissociations.
Double dissociations involve two patients and two tasks.
One patient is impaired at one task but normal on the other, while the other patient is normal on the first task and impaired on the other.
For example, patient A would be poor at reading printed words while still being normal at understanding spoken words, while the patient B would be normal at understanding written words and be poor at understanding spoken words.
Scientists can interpret this information to explain how there is a single cognitive module for word comprehension.
From studies like these, researchers infer that different areas of the brain are highly specialised.
Cognitive neuropsychology can be distinguished from cognitive neuroscience, which is also interested in brain-damaged patients, but is particularly focused on uncovering the neural mechanisms underlying cognitive processes.

The Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences is located in Leipzig, Germany.
The institute was founded in 2004 by a merger between the former Max Planck Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience in Leipzig and the Max Planck Institute for Psychological Research in Munich.
It is one of 86 institutes in the Max Planck Society.

The McGovern Institute for Brain Research is a research institute within MIT.
Its mission is to understand how the brain works and to discover new ways to prevent or treat brain disorders.
The institute was founded in 2000 by Patrick McGovern and Lore Harp McGovern with a gift to MIT that is expected to total $350M over 20 years.

The Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, engages in fundamental research in the areas of brain and neural systems, and cognitive processes.
The department is within the School of Science at the MIT and began initially as the Department of Psychology founded by the psychologist Hans-Lukas Teuber in 1964.
In 1986 the MIT Department of Psychology merged with the Whittaker College integrating Psychology and Neuroscience research to form the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.