Clinical Cognitive Neuroscience

On this course, you’ll explore cognitive neuroscience, focusing on brain-behaviour relationships and underlying neurophysiological mechanisms. You’ll study human perception across visual, auditory and tactile senses, alongside debates on neurodivergent development. You'll apply techniques such as electroencephalography (EEG), transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), psychometric assessments, eye movement tracking, and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data analysis.

How you learn

Clinical cognitive neuroscience is a specialist subject that employs cutting-edge techniques, so you’ll get hands-on practical experience of a broad range of these, supplementing and applying the knowledge you’ve gained in lectures. This multifaceted approach to learning and teaching – alongside peer and tutor feedback – helps you reflect on your own progress.

By conducting independent research and analysing complex psychophysiological data, you’ll gain the skills to work with both healthy and neuropathological populations in clinical, academic and healthcare settings.

Our course blends learning methods to facilitate active and independent learning while maintaining maximum flexible delivery.

You learn through:

In the current programme modules have been designed to supplement each other so you can consolidate your learning within broad and comprehensive conceptual and methodological frameworks.

Assessments are designed to measure your progress and help you refine your skills through a variety of methods – such as essays, case studies, presentation and a dissertation project.

Key themes The course covers both theoretical and practical aspects of perceptual and cognitive functions, and how they interact with underlying brain mechanisms, including the methodology used to research them. You’ll study electrophysiological techniques for recording and interpreting behavioural cognitive functions, alongside neural systems at the cellular and network levels, and neuropsychopharmacology sciences.

Modules also include research design, statistics, ethics, and research in theory and practice. Your dissertation takes place in the third trimester. Part-time students complete half of the taught modules in the first year and the remaining modules, along with the dissertation, in the second year.

Applied learning On this course you’ll develop a solid understanding of the vital ethical issues for working in academic and biomedical fields.

You’ll gain hands-on experience with specialised neuroscience measurement techniques used in diverse neuroscience settings. These include EEG and event-related potentials (ERPs) research design, recording and analysis, eye movement tracking, heart rate variability (HRV), MRI unit visit and psychometric testing. These core academic, practical and vocational skills will prepare you for various roles in clinical, academic and pharmaceutical neuroscience, and give you the confidence to transfer your knowledge directly to the workplace.