Department of Cognitive Neuroscience

Teaching

CN members contribute to teaching in the bachelor's programme in Psychology, the one-year master’s programme in Psychology. They also contribute to the two-year Research Master Cognitive and Clinical Neuroscience, which is run by FPN, FHML, and SBE. And there is also a M-BIC graduate school. Both students and research fellows have the option to receive further specific training, both in Maastricht and elsewhere via international collaborations.

Research

Research at the Department of Cognitive Neuroscience is embedded into the Maastricht Brain Imaging Centre. The research combines the study of human perception and cognition with the development of advanced methods in neuroscience. Various brain-imaging methods are employed to understand, predict, and change human behaviour. The research involves international and inter-disciplinary collaborations among psychologists, neuroscientists, bioengineers, IT experts, radiologists, and neurologists. M-BIC offers research facilities that were newly established within the Brains Unlimited project, including high (3 Tesla) and ultra-high (7 and 9.4 Tesla) magnetic fields MR scanners.

M-BIC tests and develops new theories of normal and abnormal neural information processing, with special attention to brain plasticity, perception and cognition, and the development of new methods for MR image acquisition and analysis. BrainVoyager, an internationally leading fMRI analysis and visualisation software package, is developed by Prof. Rainer Goebel within this group. Research activities are conducted in close collaboration with the Siemens Medical Systems (Erlangen, Germany) and with national and international leading brain imaging centers.

The 9 research lines are:

• Auditory Perception and Cognition

• Brain and Emotion

• Computational architecture of visual processing streams

• Brain and Language

• Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience

• Brain Stimulation and Cognition

• MR Methods for Neuroscience

• Perception, Attention and Learning

• Methods

• Multiscale Imaging of Brain Connectivity