Doctoral School in Cognitive and Brain Sciences

The Doctoral School in Cognitive and Brain Sciences engages students in an integrated program of research, instruction, and professional development in cognitive neuroscience, experimental psychology (animal cognition, attention, brain asymmetry, perception, reasoning, language, memory, sensory processing), experimental physics, computer science, linguistics and cognitive neuropsychology. Students actively participate in international research projects, seminars, and conferences based in the Center for Mind/Brain Sciences, which includes the Laboratories of Functional Neuroimaging (LNIF), Animal Cognition and Neuroscience (ACN Lab), the CIMeC Language, Interaction and Computation Lab (CLIC), the Experimental Psychology Laboratories, the Center for Neurocognitive Rehabilitation (CERiN), and the Computational Cognition Laboratories (CCL). The length of the program is three years. Students pursue one of two programmes: Cognitive Neuroscience or Language, Interaction and Computation. Current research topics covered at the CIMeC are listed below.

Cognitive Neuroscience:

• Animal cognition
• Brain asymmetry
• Cognitive neuroscience of language comprehension
• Comparative spatial cognition
• Dynamics of complex systems
• Eye movements and cognition
• High field MRI-derived measures of brain structure and function
• Inductive and probabilistic reasoning
• Medical decision making
• Motor control
• Motor plasticity and learning 
• Multimodal functional neuroimaging
• Multisensory integration
• Neural representation of concepts, actions and objects
• Neuroplasticity and recovery of cognitive/linguistic disorders
• Neuropsychology of decision making
• Neuropsychology of reading and writing
• Neurosciences and language disorders
• Neurosciences and the arts
• Number cognition
• Perception, attention & awareness
• Plasticity following sensory deprivation
• Psychophysics and neural computation
• Social cognition
• Visual memory
• Visual neuroscience 
• Word comprehension and production

• Automatic analysis of human behaviour, life styles and permanent traits (mood, personality) and their applications to Assisted Cognition (systems that aim to improve the quality of life of people with cognitive disabilities)
• Co-located interaction by means of active surfaces
• Cognitive and computational aspects of social networking 
• Computational lexicography and lexicology
• Embodied communication
• Integrated multimodal concept acquisition
• Multimedia intelligent interfaces
• Statistical models of text mining and coreference resolution
• Theoretical and computational models of the semantic interpretation and of the acquisition of semantic and lexical knowledge
• Theoretical linguistics
• User modeling and adaptive systems
• Vector spaces in digital libraries

Program Objectives
The objectives of the Program are to develop the next generation of cognitive neuroscientists, equipped with the requisite multidisciplinary skills and expertise to push the frontiers of the mind/brain sciences and to succeed in the global research community.