Master in Psychology
Course content specialisation Brain and Cognition
On this page you can find information about the course content of the three Master programme specific courses in Brain and Cognition.
These three courses on the field of Brain and Cognition are followed by one course in statistics (Applied Multivariate Data Analysis). In the second part of the year (from February till August), you will conduct an emperical study and write a Master thesis.
Course 1 - Cognitive & Affective Neuroscience
Course description
This course concerns the cognitive and affective neurosciences, or in other words, the biological basis of the mind. The course will deal with topics such as attention, lateralization, action, executive functions, and emotion. In this course, both theory and research will be discussed. This course focuses on the state-of-the-art neuroscientific research and the latest neuroscientific developments. The course has an interactive character: the students themselves will examine, present and discuss the latest neuroscientific findings.
Course objectives
- At the end of the course the student has profound knowledge of modern neuroscientific insights in brain functioning.
- At the end of the course the student will be able to understand and evaluate neuroscientific research.
- At the end of the course the student will be able to design his/her own neuroscientific research.
- At the end of the course the student will be able to give a scientific presentation of recent neuroscientific research.
Course 2 - Psychology of Language
This course concerns the mental processes that are involved in language use. The course will address several main areas of this field:
- The units and structure of language
- The biological (brain) basis of language
- The relation of language to other cognitive processes
- Reading (how we use the visual system to decode written language)
- Meaning and comprehension (how we make sense of what we read and hear)
- Language production (how we get from ideas to completed sentences)
- Bilingualism (the ability to speak and comprehend multiple languages)
Some of the interesting questions we will address are: Does the language we speak influence how we think? What parts of the human brain are used for processing language? How does the brain represent meaning? How does the brain recognize sound waves or squiggles on a page as meaningful words? How do we understand stories? How do we understand metaphors? How do we convert a thought into a sentence? Why do we gesture as we speak? How do we remember who said what in a conversation?
Course objectives
The main objective of this course is for students to gain a basic understanding of the cognitive processes associated with human language. Students will be introduced to many aspects of language use, and will discuss some of these topics in depth. They will become familiar with important theories and models of language comprehension and language production and with the methods that are used to test them. At the end of this course, students will understand how psycholinguists and neuroscientists conduct experiments to inform theories and specify models of language processing. Furthermore, students will be familiar with some of the tools that are used by researchers in the field of psycholinguistics. Finally, students will gain experience in critically reading - and partly writing - manuscripts on language processing.
Course 3 - Concepts & Categories
Course description
Without semantic knowledge we (as people) wouldn't be able to function. We wouldn't know what furniture is for, how to get to work, what words mean, and so on. The basic function of knowledge is to categorize. We have names for groups of things such as dogs, cats, cars, computers, birds, birthdays, and balloons. Likewise, we have names for properties (tall, red, moody) as well as actions (walk, eat, compare). Furthermore, we can combine categories to create an unlimited number of new categories, like "cold white wine" or "moody red cats".
Categories allow us to make sense of our experiences and to plan actions. If each thing we encountered were unique and totally unlike anything else we had ever known, we would not know how to react or make any predictions about its properties. We need to categorize all the time. When we recognize something as a dog, our knowledge of the category dogs (they sometimes bark, like to be petted, and so on) allows us to understand and predict their actions. If we need to enter our house our categorization of one thing as a lock, and another as a key, and the knowledge about their functions prevents us from having to sleep on the street.
For some people this categorization process doesn't work so well anymore. There is a group of patients with brain damage who have a deficit in categorizing certain things. A number of cases have been reported of patients who have category-specific deficits. These people usually have a problem retrieving knowledge about living things such as birds and cows, but have no problem with retrieving knowledge about non-living things such as hammers and cars. Another group of patients have brain damage that has lead to more general loss of semantic knowledge. Themes 2 and 5 are devoted to these patient groups, and in addition you will encounter data or theories about semantic deficits in the other themes.
The main focus, however, will be on theories of 'normal' knowledge representation. For themes 1 and 3 you will read and discuss various models of categorization and how categorization is related to knowledge. Theme 4 deals with semantic priming and the organization of semantic knowledge. Theme 6 deals with embodied cognition, a relatively new approach in cognitive science. Finally, theme 7 will deal with semantic knowledge in the healthy brain.
During this course you will do a practical in addition to the theoretical themes. The purpose of this practical is to give you hands-on experience with doing research. You will design materials for an experiment, program the experiment using E-prime, collect some data, analyse the data, and write the methods and results of a paper. In addition, there will be some practice of counterbalancing.
As you will learn in this course, categorization can be quite fuzzy. This also applies to the categorization of literature and subtopics into themes. Most of the articles have quite some overlap with other themes, and the themes themselves are of course often overlapping. You will also notice that some topics in this course overlap with topics from the course Memory and on Language. Although this may be a bit confusing in the beginning, it's actually very good that this is the case. It means that researchers from different fields are interacting and using each others insights. It also means that you will be able to integrate your knowledge on different topics and thus leave this course with a coherent knowledge base rather that a messy collection of facts.
Course objectives
At the end of this course you will understand:
- The important theories and models of categorizatiom
- The different views on concept representation
- Priming research and its implications
- The embodied cognition framework
- How semantic knowledge is represented in the brain
- How brain damage leads to loss of semantic knowledge
- How to design experiments and write a research paper
