This course is the kick-off of the research master Brain and Cognitive Sciences (MBCS). It's an intensive week that showcases the field, brings you to consider the future of neuroscience and cognitive sciences and prepares you to start the first year of your new programme.

In this academic skills course, you and your fellow students will develop interdisciplinary skills by exploring a given topic in the cognitive sciences via an interdisciplinary approach. You will learn how to work together with peers from different academic backgrounds and integrate various perspectives for a common research goal. Through this process you will develop skills in critical thinking, problem solving, and science communication.

The course Higher Cognitive Functions aims to showcase studies into some faculties that have classically been considered to be of a high level, such as language use, decision-making, and theory of mind. Students will learn how current insights on these topics have historically been constructed, what light they shed on the functioning of our minds, which debates are still ongoing and how theories of cognition are moving forward.

This course introduces the functional neuroanatomy of the brain and current approaches and theories in Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience for students with a background in Behavioural Sciences (e.g. Economics, Psychology and Sociology). The goal of the course is to provide an overview of fundamental topics, research approaches, and theories which guide our current thinking in Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience in a format that is accessible to Behavioural Scientists.

The course Neuroscience: From Cell to Behaviour provides students with up-to-date insights into fundamental aspects of brain function in various organisms, predominantly rodents and humans, and whether these insights can be translated to clinical practice. The course focuses on theory, experimental approaches, and interpretation and translatability of findings to the human situation.

Reverse engineering the mind, or understanding the computational principles that give rise to cognition, is a common goal of cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and neuroscience. Despite this shared goal, these three disciplines largely developed independently of one another, using different languages, concepts and tools. This course will present the study of cognition from the perspective of each of these disciplines and provide an overview the various empirical approaches used in each.

This course gives an overview of common methods used to answer research questions in cognitive neuroscience. These methods exist at various levels of description in the brain, from the cellular, regional, inter-regional to the systems level. At these various levels we are using in vitro methods, animal models, human subject and mathematical models. Each method will be explained from the ground up: starting from the principles of the signals we are recording in the brain, to the raw data we acquire, and the extraction of relevant data from these.

During this course, students will get hands-on experience with various commonly used research methods in the field of neuroscience and learn to critically evaluate the (dis)advantages of each of these techniques for answering specific research questions. The course will also address important ethical considerations when using animal models to study cognition.

In this semester you can choose one of six Electives: 1. Advanced Neural and Cognitive Modelling 2. Cognitive Data Science: Genes, Brains and Behaviour 3. Foundations of Neural and Cognitive Modelling 4. Introduction to Python Programming for Neuroscientists 5. NeuroImaging: Bold MRI 6. Research Design and Statistics

Electives are courses that broaden your preparation as a researcher in brain and cognitive sciences. A list of courses that have been pre-approved as Electives can be found in the programme-specific section of the Course Catalogue. MBCS students typically do one Elective in block 2 of the first year and one or two Electives in the first block(s) of the second year.

One of the capstones of the research master Brain and Cognitive Sciences (MBCS), Research Project 1 is a module in which the students receive hands-on training in setting up, performing, analysing, interpreting and discussing a scientific experiment. Students contact a researcher who does work that they find interesting and agree on a research question and overall approach. You can choose from 26-32 ECTS. The combined value of the Research Projects is flexible and can be 62 or 68 ECTS.

The Summer School is a two-week, multidisciplinary exploration of a topic that is tied to the Amsterdam Brain and Cognition Center. Experts from ABC, as well as international experts, join to show how the topic is addressed in the different subfields of brain and cognitive sciences. It starts with a series of lectures and seminars and closes off with the ABC Symposium, a festive event that also marks the end of the academic year.