International School for
Advanced Studies, Trieste
Written Exam for Admission
to the Cognitive Neuroscience PhD curriculum
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.
* * * * *
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.