This course is intended to provide an overview of, and discuss state-of-the-art developments in the cognitive neuroscience of attention and action control. The selection of papers focuses on the experimental analysis of action-control mechanisms including goal representation, action selection, action planning, sequential action planning, multitasking, and error monitoring.

Social cognitive neuroscience is an emerging scientific discipline that attempts to integrate the theories, methods and insights of cognitive psychology, social cognition and cognitive neuroscience. This course is intended to review and discuss state-of-the-art developments in this area, covering issues like self-perception, action perception and interpretation, imitation and the recognition of affect.

Reinforcement learning is the adaptive process by which we learn to predict the consequences of our behavior through interactions with our environment. Over the last few decades, this has been intensively studied in a range of fields including psychology, artificial intelligence, animal and human neuroscience and economics. A related but largely separate literature is concerned with how we make optimal decisions based on noisy sensory information.

This course is intended to provide an overview of the computational and neural mechanisms of reinforcement learning and (value-based and perceptual) decision making, and to gain insight in the use of computational models to account for experimental data.

Topics include classical and instrumental conditioning, Markov decision processes, the exploitation-exploration tradeoff, and sequential sampling models of perceptual decision-making.

Neuromodulation is the process in which several classes of neurotransmitters in the nervous system regulate diverse populations of neurons (one neuron uses different neurotransmitters to connect to several neurons). In recent years, there has been a considerable increase in interest how cognition is shaped by neuromodulation and key roles of several transmitter systems were identified. This course is intended to review and discuss state-of-the-art developments in neuromodulation, covering issues like the roles of acetylcholine and serotonin in memory, of dopamine in learning and executive control, and of norepinephrine in visual attention.