MRes Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuropsychology

The unit will describe a series of studies using functional neuroimaging techniques to explore questions in cognitive and social neuroscience. Examples of areas covered include, language, memory, attention, face recognition, cross-modal processing, sleep, emotion and social cognition. The course will explore and evaluate ways in which different acquisition and analysis techniques have been used to investigate contrasting questions, showing how in some cases they have provided convergent data. The course will evaluate the validity of analytic approaches incorporating personality measures. The unit will also draw on human lesion work to illustrate how functional neuroimaging hypotheses have evolved and how data from functional neuroimaging informs human lesion models.

Provide students with a broad background to fMRI and EEG/ERP applications in cognitive and social neuroscience. Through examples, the course will illustrate a variety of ways in which these techniques can be used to explore the neural bases of cognition, emotion, social cognition and behaviour.

By the end of this course unit, students will:

• Have a detailed understanding of how fMRI and EEG have been used to explore cognitive and social neuroscience
• Understand how questions asked with functional neuroimaging can address issues raised by lesion studies
• Be able to develop a theoretically relevant hypothesis and examine it using functional imaging
• Be competent at evaluating research exploring cognitive and social theories using functional imaging