Cognitive neuroscience of auditory and cross-modal perception - Lectures and assignments

Cognitive neuroscience is a fast developing scientific field which aims at uncovering the neural basis of human perception and cognition. To achieve this goal, cognitive neuroscience uses a variety of tools and approaches ranging from non-invasive brain imaging to psychophysics and neural modeling. Mastering such tools requires skills and knowledge from multiple scientific domains, including neurophysiology, cognitive psychology, and several computational fields.

Over the past several decades, significant advances have been made in particular in the imaging and computational fields, providing us with large amounts of data about the brain function, with tools to analyze them, and, in turn, with a multitude of new advances in our understanding of the neural information processing. This proceedings provides a snapshot of our current knowledge in cognitive neuroscience, focusing on the mechanisms of auditory and cross-modal perception. It contains a collection of introductory lectures, research talks, and lab assignments prepared by invited experts in this field for two editions of a workshop and lecture series on “Cognitive neuroscience of auditory and cross-modal perception” that took place in Košice in 2014 and 2015. It is aimed at students and early-stage researchers interested in obtaining an overview of the basic knowledge, current research questions, and methods used in auditory and cross-modal perceptual research.

Each invited expert prepared one introductory lecture providing overview of his/her expertise, one advanced lecture on a current research topic, and an assignment related to his/her research. These teaching materials are provided in the first two parts of the proceedings. The third part provides abstracts of contributed presentations by the workshop participants. In addition, the accompanying CD and web provides the code and/or data of the assignments. The lectures only contain slides of the individual talks, and thus only provide an outline of the research topics and cannot be used as a textbook. For a reader interested in working on an assignment it is useful to first read through the corresponding lectures by the same author which contain a broader introduction to the selected problem. Most of the assignments code is in MATLAB and requires basic familiarity with this environment.

Additional information about this proceedings is available at http://pcl.upjs.sk/workshopcd and https://sites.google.com/site/kogneuro/. We hope that this collection of lectures and assignments will find its excited readers and that it will provide an introduction that will be as enjoyable as the workshops were for the experts and the participants. And, we will be looking forward to meet some of the readers at future editions of the workshop.

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