Undergraduate Course: Neurobiology of Cognition (BIME10010)
Course Outline
| School | Deanery of Biomedical Sciences |
College | College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 10 (Year 4 Undergraduate) |
Availability | Not available to visiting students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | Progress in contemporary neuroscience is beginning to give us a handle on the network, cellular and molecular mechanisms that underlie ¿cognition¿. This course is intended to complement the Learning and Memory course of Neuroscience 4, and will cover related but different material.
It will consist of a mixture of lectures and seminars, led by RM with occasional contributions from colleagues, including Chancellor¿s Fellows, senior postdoctoral staff and guest-lecturers.
Research using both humans and animals will be covered. Key ideas to be covered include, in Section 1: identifying cognition as a fundamental aspect of brain function; the importance of innovative new techniques for novel analyses of neural circuits and neural plasticity; Section 2: the concepts of attention, working-memory and executive function ¿ with a digression into mirror neurons; Section 3: scientific hypotheses such as the idea that activity-dependent synaptic plasticity (such as LTP and LTD) may play a role in memory, the synaptic tagging and capture hypothesis of memory persistence, systems consolidation and schemas, and the possibility of active processes of forgetting; Section 4: social cognition and its disorders, notably neurodevelopmental disorders, and the need for ¿effective¿ new animal models of neurological diseases such as Alzheimer¿s. Thus, the course will cover both normal cognitive function, and how cognition can suffer and might be ameliorated in genetic abnormalities of a neurodevelopmental or neurodegenerative nature.
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| Course description |
Not entered
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Course Delivery Information
| Not being delivered |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- research a particular topic in depth and write a detailed essay with diagrams about it.
- develop an understanding of what cognition is and how it enables us to understand the world around us and to react appropriately.
- develop an appreciation of how new techniques in neuroscience developed in the last 10-15 years are transforming the subject.
- acquire mastery of two or more areas within the domain of cognition as well as a working knowledge of the scope of the subject and develop skills for reading advanced scientific papers, distilling the essence of this work, and presenting it to their student colleagues.
- attend and sit an examination covering the range of material of the course.
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Reading List
General textbooks of neuroscience that include sections on the neurobiology of cognition
Kandel, ER, Schwartz J and Jessel T (2012) Principles of Neural Science, Elsevier, 5th Edition.
Gazzaniga, M (2009) The Cognitive Neurosciences III MIT Press.
More specialised monographs and texts that may prove useful
Anderson P, Morris R, Amaral D, Bliss T and O¿Keefe J (2007). The Hippocampus Book. Oxford University Press.
Blakemore, S-J and Frith, U. (2005) The Learning Brain: lessons for education. Blackwell Publishing.
Fuster, J (2008) The Prefrontal Cortex. Academic Press.
Rizzolatti, G and Sinigaglia, C (2008) Mirrors in the Brain. Oxford University Press.
Squire LR and Kandel ER (2000) Memory: From mind to molecules. Scientific American Library.
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Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
Not entered |
| Keywords | NoC |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Oliver Hardt
Tel: (0131 6)51 1906
Email: Oliver.Hardt@ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary | Ms Caroline Morris
Tel: (0131 6)51 3255
Email: c.d.morris@ed.ac.uk |
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