Prospectus

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Cognitive Neuroscience

Course
2024-2025

Admission requirements

Not applicable.

Description

Cognitive neuroscience traditionally studies cognitive psychological processes, such as perception, action, emotion, consciousness, memory, decision making and attention in humans from different angles and disciplines. The aim of cognitive neuroscience is to examine mechanisms in the nervous system and cognitive models that can explain these human functions. This is achieved using techniques, knowledge and modelling from biochemistry, anatomy, physiology, pathology, behavioural psychology, and informatics. In this course, students will learn new insights with regard to how humans process information and how this is relevant for artificial intelligence.

Course objectives

After this course, the student is able to:

  • Explain fundamental neuroscientific principles like gross brain anatomy and neuronal firing;

  • Explain how cognitive neuroscientific methods such as MRI, EEG, and lesion studies can be used to study brain and cognition;

  • Explain key principles and mechanisms underlying human cognition including perception, memory, and action control;

  • Implement a simple multi-layer perceptron and convolutional neural network for image classification;

  • Compare the brain to artificial neural networks in (visual) perception in a written essay.

Timetable

You will find the timetables for all courses and degree programmes of Leiden University in the tool MyTimetable (login). Any teaching activities that you have sucessfully registered for in MyStudymap will automatically be displayed in MyTimetable. Any timetables that you add manually, will be saved and automatically displayed the next time you sign in.

MyTimetable allows you to integrate your timetable with your calendar apps such as Outlook, Google Calendar, Apple Calendar and other calendar apps on your smartphone. Any timetable changes will be automatically synced with your calendar. If you wish, you can also receive an email notification of the change. You can turn notifications on in ‘Settings’ (after login).

For more information, watch the video or go the the 'help-page' in MyTimetable. Pleas note: Joint Degree students Leiden/Delft have to merge their two different timetables into one. This video explains how to do this.

Mode of instruction

14 lectures and 14 workgroups.

Assessment method

The final grade for this course will be an average of:

  • A written exam (partly open questions, and parly multiple choice) – weight 60%

  • A lab report – weight 40%
    The minimal grade for both the exam and the paper is 5.0 and the weighted average must be higher than 5.5 in order to pass this course. There is a resit opportunity for the exam, and for the lab report. The maximum grade for the lab report resit is a 6.0. Non-completed lab reports are graded with a 1.

Reading list

Ward, J., The Student’s Guide to Cognitive Neuroscience. Psychology Press (2019) 4th Edition.
ISBN: 9781138490543 (paperback)

Registration

Every student has to register for courses with the new enrollment tool MyStudymap. There are two registration periods per year: registration for the fall semester opens in July and registration for the spring semester opens in December. Please see this page for more information.

Please note that it is compulsory to register for every exam and retake. Not being registered for a course means that you are not allowed to participate in the final exam of the course.

Extensive FAQ on MyStudymap can be found here.

Contact

Dr. Steven Miletić
Email: s.miletic@fsw.leidenuniv.nl Education coordinator LIACS bachelors

Remarks

Not applicable.