The Research Master Brain and Cognitive Sciences is an interdisciplinary master's programme that trains students from a wide range of cognition-oriented backgrounds to become researchers in neuroscience and/or cognitive science. Besides coursework, the students perform three individual projects. The combination of these three projects should prepare them well for a research career. 1. In ***Research Project 1***: - Students spend 4-5 months in a hosting lab to experience what it is like to use a particular method or analysis technique in the context of scientific research. - Students write a technical report and give an oral presentation on their work. - At the end of the project, students should have a good grasp of the acquisition and analysis methods that they used and should understand how their practical work fits into a broader theoretical context. 2. Subsequently, in ***Literature Thesis***: - Students spend two months writing a synthesis of existing literature to deal with a self-identified problem statement - Students develop the skills to critically evaluate scientific literature. While for *Research Project 1* it was enough to understand a single theoretical framework that was applicable to the project, in the Literature Thesis they actively seek to compare and contrast different bodies of research, finding a problem that they can attempt to resolve. - Students place their arguments in a multidisciplinary context, considering how their findings relate to other disciplines. 3. Finally, in ***Research Project 2***: - Students spend 6 - 7 months on a project in which they take more ownership than was the case for *Research Project 1*. - Having the experience from the first project, as well as the ability to critically assess scientific literature, *Research Project 2* asks the student to think along with experimental design choices, choose acquisition or analysis methods and go through the full empirical cycle whenever that's realistic. - The student prepares a journal article after this second project and holds a public defence of their work. The combination of *Research Project 1* and *Research Project 2* should have the student personally engage with the following during experimental work: - [ ] Data acquisition - [ ] Formulation of research question/hypotheses - [ ] Experimental design - [ ] Collection/review of scientific literature - [ ] Data analysis In other words, if one of these components is missing from one project, it should be included in another project. For more details on the overall setup of the capstone projects, see the corresponding manuals: - [[Research Project 1 Manual]] - [[Literature Thesis Manual]] - [[Research Project 2 Manual]]