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?