Neuroscience

What Will You Learn?

Neuroscience is an interdepartmental program with the Department of Psychology and the Department of Biology & Environmental Science. By pursuing this major, you will have an enhanced understanding of the neural structures and systems controlling functions such as vision, memory, emotion, movement, and, ultimately, all of human behavior.

Work in the Cognitive Neuroscience Lab

Under the direction of psychology and neuroscience faculty, you can join teams of undergraduate researchers in the Cognitive Neuroscience Lab to identify and plan projects, run data collection sessions, prepare and analyze the data, and write and present the results. You have a variety of research tools at your disposal.

There are five general-purpose cognitive psychology research stations, each equipped with E-Prime laboratory software, Matlab, and the SPSS statistical analysis package. Advanced psychophysiology measurement equipment records muscle activity (EMG), skin temperature, and skin conductance (EDA). A 24-channel Electroencephalogram (EEG) data acquisition system studies brain activity related to music, language, and attention.

The location of eye fixations is closely related to what the brain is attending to and processing at any given moment, so we added an SMI Red 500 eye-tracking system. It includes eye-tracking glasses that can be worn while shopping, driving, and many other activities that can’t be reproduced in the lab.