Ulric Neisser’s 1967 classic, Cognitive Psychology, both created and defined a field [1]. In the introduction to his book, Neisser writes of cognition as ‘‘all processes by which the sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used... such terms as sensation, perception, imagery, retention, recall, problem-solving, and thinking, among others, refer to hypothetical stages or aspects of cognition’’. Neisser did not consider its neural basis to be especially relevant — he likened psychology to economics, both ‘‘concerned with the interdependence among certain events rather than with their physical nature’’. Now, 36 years later, the subject of this issue is that portion of cognition that Neisser set aside, cognitive neuroscience. Interest in this new member of the family of cognitive sciences has grown spectacularly in the last decade or so, largely because of the development of new tools to probe the neural mechanisms of Neisser’s ‘hypothetical stages’ of cognition. The growth of cognitive neuroscience represents a gigantic collective guess that Neisser was wrong, and that understanding cognition will be speeded by knowing how cognitive acts are computed and represented by the brain. Whether this approach will succeed is hard to say; but there is no doubt that this focus on specific mechanisms has brought together many formerly disparate parts of psychology through a common interest in the biological structures that mediate cognition.