Cognitive Neuroscience: 1998 Admission Exams

Please answer three (3) of the following questions:
1) Briefly describe the most important principles of the anatomical organization of the cerebral cortex.
2) Describe the main functional streams in the visual system.
3) Illustrate the techniques and experiments necessary to demonstrate that a factor has a neurotrophic action.
4) Discuss the role of spontaneous electrical activity in the development of functional connectivity.
5) You have access to every methodological tool.  Design an experiment to test possible regenerative properties of CNS neurons.
6) Using a 100 x 100 geometric array of microelectrodes (10,000 electrodes), you can record neuronal activity in 1 ms time bins from some region of cerebral cortex believed to be involved with sensory processing.  Thus you have available a spatially-temporally distributed record of activity.  Invent analytical methods to compare the total pattern of activity when different sensory stimuli are delivered to the subject.  Make neat sketches to illustrate your plan.  Explain what each analytical method might be able to tell you about cortical sensory processing.
7) Describe the main functions of the superior parietal lobule, in humans.
8) You find yourself transported 20 years into the future and the first thing you want to do is a cognitive neuroscience experiment.  You have access to every methodological tool existing in the year 2018.  Describe an experiment to find out:

(a) what parts of the brain are involved in a specific task of learning or memory (you invent the task), and
(b) what these areas might actually be contributing to the task.
Be as specific as possible in designing an experiment, explaining the (new) method, and what sort of result would show how a brain area contributes to the selected behavior.

9) A magazine carries the headlines “Every Man Will Be A Genius.”  In the article, scientists state that, very soon, they will have the technology to store very large quantities of information on silicone microchips and implant these chips in the human brain.  For example, the contents of an entire encyclopedia could be put into the brain.
 (a) How is information stored by the brain different from information stored by a silicone chip?  How is it the same?
 (b) What are the major challenges the scientists must face?  For example, to what part of the brain should they connect the chip?  How should they transfer information from the chip to the brain, and vice versa?

10) Imagine having to take over as commander of an isolated Czarist outpost in the Caucasus.  The only way to communicate any message, from military reports to letters by your men to their families, is to dispatch one of the men – and they are very few - either through dangerous Circassian-held territory, or via a long detour through the safer Ossetian wastelands.  You can expect very few replacements for those who fail to return, and serious damage if they are intercepted.  Use your imagination to complete and quantify this description with the definition of a cost function, dependent on parameters like the probabilities of the messenger(s) being caught and of the outpost being attacked and overrun. On this basis sketch an optimal strategy or schedule for using your communication channels.
11) Forget Guido d'Arezzo. Devise an original notation for Western music, and briefly discuss its virtues and flaws as a coding system. 
12) If SISSA were to provide lodging for its students, postdocs and visitors, it might base its estimate of the rooms required on the replies given to a questionnaire, collected at a few discrete times during the year. Formulate a simple reasonable model of the time course of the need for rooms as a function of a few parameters, and indicate how to best estimate those parameters by either monitoring the relevant statistics or conducting polls at the appropriate times.
13) Take one neuropsychological syndrome and explain what relevance its study has had to our understanding of the functional organisation in the normal brain of the underlying systems which are impaired.

14) Has functional imaging of perceptual, memory  and  cognitive tasks done more than localise much more precisely, processes which have already been isolated and characterised by the use of other methods?
15) Are the different uses of the term "working memory" compatible?  Which of them has/have proved most fruitful for explaining (a) neuropsychological phenomena and (b) phenomena derived from other empirical methods?