Junior Louter
Alumnus Brain & Cognition - Researcher
After obtaining my Bachelor's degree in psychology at Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR), I chose to continue my studies with the Master's programme in Brain & Cognition. My choice at the time was motivated by my extremely positive experiences with the enthusiastic lecturers from the B&C department, and of course also by my interest in the topics within (neuro)cognitive psychology, such as memory, language, and attention.
During the Master's programme, I had fascinating courses on cognitive neuroscience, cognition in the digital age, advanced data analysis, and concepts and categories. Because the programme is relatively small-scale, students receive intensive guidance from internationally recognised experts during workgroups and lectures. What I personally really like is that the programme's emphasis is not on memorising factual knowledge from (old) books or papers, as the research field of Brain & Cognition is currently developing tremendously fast. Instead, the emphasis is on making your own inventory of the literature on a particular topic based on recent publications: what do we currently know, and what knowledge is still lacking? Of course, this also involves critically evaluating the literature and forming your own opinion on the conclusions drawn from the literature.
There is also a strong focus on developing practical skills needed by a young researcher. During the programme you will, for example, become skilled in using the widely used coding language R, programming experiments with the programme E-Prime, and collecting and analysing EEG data.
Enrolling in the Master's programme in Brain & Cognition also means that you will have access to the advanced Erasmus Behavioural Lab (EBL), where scientific research is conducted with e.g., EEG, eye-tracking, and virtual reality. For your thesis project, students will conduct empirical research on a topic of their choice. I myself had the opportunity to do a very nice study on verbal working memory, where we used pupillometry (measuring pupil size with an infrared camera).
All in all, I believe that the Master's programme in Brain & Cognition prepared me excellently for a future as a scientific researcher in the field of (neuro)cognitive psychology. Currently, I am working as a researcher on a project using virtual reality and eye-tracking to study the impact of the use of navigational aids on the hippocampus. Therefore, I cannot but highly recommend this programme!
