The Faculty of Science also participates in the priority area of Brain and Cognitive Science, for which the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences acts as representative.
Other participants in this priority area include the Faculty of Humanities, the Faculty of Economics and Business and the Academic Medical Centre (AMC).

Summary

Within the UvA, the Cognitive Science Center of the University of Amsterdam (CSCA), the SILS Center for Neuroscience (SILS-CNS), and the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) focus on a number of key areas in cognition research that benefit strongly from an interdisciplinary approach. Their overall mission is to come to a better understanding of the brain mechanisms underlying cognition.

Four basic themes are distinguished.

• How do we perceive and understand the world?
• How do we control our actions and responses to a changing environment?
• How do we learn and remember?
• How do brain pathologies relate to cognition?

In the first theme there is a strong emphasis on understanding how the brain mediates perception, by focusing at the level of cells and neuronal networks. Cognitive and mathematical modelers, experimental psychologists and neuroscientists participate in this program.

In the second theme, reward and punishment are central issues in their control of behavior, and how reinforcement can affect learning, memory and decision-making. Experimental psychologists, neuroscientists, psychiatrists, linguists and economists work together to address these questions.

In the third theme, there is a strong focus on translating data from single nerve cells to learning in vivo, as expressed in animal or human behavior. Experimental and clinical psychologists, neuroscientists, linguists and cognitive modelers participate.

The fourth theme underscores that for the other three themes the link to the diseased state is highly relevant, not only from a fundamental point of view, but also given the extremely high impact of brain diseases in society. Experimental and clinical psychologists, neuroscientists, psychiatrists concentrate on Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, epilepsy, autism and schizophrenia.

The research priority is acknowledged by the Faculty of Science and the Board of the university and received additional funding from the Board in 2009. 

Scientific case

CSCA was established in 2001 to combine different expertises and thereby promote interdisciplinary research and teaching in Brain and Cognitive Sciences. The Center now comprises groups from Biology, Psychology, Computer Science, Philosophy, Linguistics, Logic, Medical Sciences and Economics.

The Center brings together top-level scientists from a broad range of fields that share a common interest in the acquisition, storage and representation of information, and how these processes are mediated by the brain. Interdisciplinary collaboration is necessary to enable fundamental breakthroughs in our understanding of the human (and animal) mind, brain and behavior.

CSCA serves as a community for neuroscientists and cognitive scientists interested in a wide range of topics, ranging from perception to memory, decision-making, action selection to understanding brain disorders such as epilepsy and Alzheimer’s disease. In all four themes, researchers of SILS and ILLC collaborate with each other and with members of other Faculties, such as Medical Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences and Economy.

The contribution by SILS-CNS lies particularly in unraveling the cellular substrates of these cognitive processes such as learning, attention (plasticity of cells and synapses) and during memory processing in e.g. wakefulness and sleep, and by using computational models of neurons and networks that learn and remember.

Logically this also involves the changes in (behavior of) those circuits in the diseased state. The contribution of the ILLC lies primarily in the computational  and cognitive modeling of language, music and reasoning using a variety of methods from computer science, linguistics, philosophy, and the social sciences. CSCA is strongly linked with the Spinoza Center for Neuroimaging. The combination of advanced electrophysiology, in vivo 2-photon imaging, molecular neuroscience, animal behavior and brain imaging facilities with the ambitious interdisciplinary research groups of CSCA creates a true center of excellence in the field of cognition as a whole.

 Specific contributions by the SILS-CNS are in the fields of synaptic and neuronal plasticity, memory and sleep, perception and multisensory integration, adult neurogenesis, stem cells, reward-driven decision-making and in the study of several brain disorders such as autism, epilepsy, schizophrenia, mental retardation, depression, Alzheimer´s disease, (early) stress and anxiety disorders. Several publications from the SILS-CNS and ILLC with large impact since 2008 are mentioned below. 

Publications

1. Lansink CS, Goltstein PM, Lankelma JV, McNaughton BL and Pennartz CM (2009) Hippocampus leads ventral striatum in replay of place-reward information PLoS Biol. 7: e1000173.
2. Huijbers W, Pennartz CMA, Cabeza R and Daselaar SM (2009) When learning and remembering compete: a functional MRI study. PLoS Biology 7: e1000011.
3. Peyrache, A., Khamassi, M., Benchenane, K., Wiener, S.I., and Battaglia, F.P. (2009). Replay of rule learning related neural patterns in the prefrontal cortex during sleep. Nature Neuroscience 12, 919-926.
4. Oomen CA, Soeters H, N Audureau, L Vermunt, F van Hasselt, M Joëls, PJ Lucassen* and H Krugers*. Reduced neurogenesis and altered cellular morphology after early maternal deprivation is paralleled by impaired water maze aquisition but increases in fear memory in the adult male rat. Journal of Neuroscience 2010; 30, 6635-6645.
5. Lucassen PJ, MW Stumpel, Q Wang, E Aronica. Decreased numbers of progenitor cells but no response to antidepressant drugs in the hippocampus of elderly depressed patients. Neuropharmacology, 58 (2010) 940-949.
6. Van Tijn P, W Kamphuis, MW Marlatt, EM. Hol, Paul J. Lucasssen. Presenilin mouse and zebrafish models for dementia: Focus on neurogenesis. Progress in Neurobiology, Vol 93, Issue 2, 2011, 149-164.
7. Gorter JA, van Vliet EA, Aronica E, Breit T, Rauwerda H, Lopes da Silva FH, Wadman WJ. Potential new antiepileptogenic targets indicated by microarray analysis in a rat model for temporal lobe epilepsy. J Neurosci. 2006;26(43): 11083-110
8. van Strien NM, Cappaert NL, Witter MP The anatomy of memory: an interactive overview of the parahippocampal-hippocampal network. Nat Rev Neurosci. 2009;10(4):272-82.
9. Chameau P, Inta D, Vitalis T, Monyer H, Wadman WJ, van Hooft JA.The N-terminal region of reelin regulates postnatal dendritic maturation of cortical pyramidal neurons. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2009;106(17):7227-32.
10. Winkler, I, Haden, G, Ladinig, O, Sziller, I, & Honing, H (2009). Newborn infants detect the beat in music. Proc Natl Acad Sci, 106, 2468-2471.
11. Frank S, Bod R, (2011). Insensitivity of the Human Sentence-Processing System to Hierarchical Structure, Psychological Science. doi: 10.1177/0956797611409589
12. Honing H, Ladinig O, Winkler I, Háden (2009). Is beat induction innate or learned? Probing emergent meter perception in adults and newborns using event-related brain potentials (ERP). The Neurosciences and Music III — Disorders and Plasticity: Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1169, 93–96.
13. R. Bod, (2009). From Exemplar to Grammar: A Probabilistic Analogy-based Model of Language Learning. Cognitive Science, 33(5), 752-793.

For more information on this subject, please visit the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences website.