International School for Advanced Studies, Trieste

Written Exam for Admission to the Cognitive Neuroscience PhD curriculum

April 12, 2005

 

 

English is the language strongly preferred by the Commission.  Italian may be used if absolutely necessary.  Please write clearly.

 

 

Please answer exactly three (3) of the following questions.

 

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1)      Design a study to investigate the links (or their absence) between action and conceptual knowledge or between action and language. Give a brief summary of the relevant literature, explain the rational of the study you intend to carry out, formulate your predictions, describe the method section in details, including participants, design, procedure as well as the statistical analysis you would apply to your hypothetical data.

 

2)      Tell us about a neuroscience publication that has had a major influence on you. Use the following format for your answer: (a) title and authors (accuracy not required); (b) the problem addressed in the paper, (c) what was known about the problem before; (d) the methods used to approach the problem; (e) the main results; (f) the authors’ interpretation of the results; (g) how this publication changed your way of thinking. Alternatively, you may do the same exercise for a lecture that you have attended.

 

3)      What abilities should one master to understand a natural language? Discuss how an infant could acquire at least one of them.

 

4)      Suppose that a new fMRI study has identified a brain area whose function was previously unknown, but which now appears to be activated during presentation of stimuli of one sensory modality. In patients undergoing a neurosurgical operation, you have the opportunity to find out exactly what role this area has in sensory processing by measuring neuronal activity with an electrode. Explain exactly what sort of experiment (what kind of stimuli) you would use while recording neuronal activity, and how you would analyze as quantitatively as possible, the data. To make your answer more detailed, refer to an existing sensory modality and "invent" the function of this brain area.

 

5)      Formulate a quantitative description of the degree of internal connectivity in the parliament of a country of your choice, trying to capture those factors which may be important in determining voting statistics. Rely on your common sense.

 

6)      Describe the salient characteristics of associative memory networks.

 

7)      Describe the major functional processes underlying synaptic transmission and modifications in synaptic efficacy, and indicate which aspects, in your view, are particularly important at the cognitive level of analysis.

 

8)      Do you think animals can speak a natural language, if properly trained? If yes, with what training? If no, what would make it impossible?

 

9)      Describe two different examples of signal and sensory transduction which, you think, are of particular relevance for understanding information processing in the brain.

 

10)  An oriental carpet-maker and admirer of Dante Alighieri plans to reproduce the entire Divina Commedia on a 40,000 knots/m2 carpet. To help reduce the final size of the artifact, he asks for your assistance in devising a compressed code in which 14th century Italian is represented by strings of knots of 4 different colors. Describe a possible solution and estimate the total area required for the poem, comprised of 100 canti, each of about 150 verses of 11 syllables each.

 

11)  Describe the main properties of optic aphasia.

 

12)  Design a functional imaging experiment to investigate any theoretical issue in cognitive neuroscience. How would you analyse the results? Select patterns of results and give a theoretical interpretation.