The CNBC is a joint venture of the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University. Our center leverages the strengths of the University of Pittsburgh in basic and clinical neuroscience and those of Carnegie Mellon in cognitive and computational neuroscience to support a coordinated cross-university research and educational program of international stature. In addition to our Ph.D. program in Neural Computation, we sponsor a graduate certificate program in cooperation with a wide variety of affiliated Ph.D. programs.

Within the CNBC, our over 200 world-class faculty and trainees are investigating the cognitive and neural mechanisms that give rise to biological intelligence and behavior. Research topics include affective, cognitive, linguistic, perceptual, motor and social systems in both normal and disordered populations, as well as computational neuroscience. The CNBC also promotes the translation of findings from basic research into applications for medicine, education, robotics and artificial intelligence.

Carnegie Mellon University will award the third annual Andrew Carnegie Prize in Mind and Brain Sciences to Ed Boyden, associate professor of biological engineering and brain and cognitive sciences at the MIT Media Lab and the MIT McGovern Institute. treatments.

The prize, given by the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition (CNBC) and funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York as part of its centennial celebration, recognizes trailblazers in the mind and brain sciences whose research has helped advance the field and its applications. The CNBC will present the award to Boyden at 4 p.m. on Thursday, April 9 in the Rashid Auditorium in CMU's Hillman Center for Future Generation Technologies.  Read more...

New research published under the title The idiosyncratic brain: distortion of spontaneous connectivity patterns in autism spectrum disorder  in Nature Neuroscience suggests that the various reports — of both over- and under-connectivity — may, in fact, reflect a deeper principle of brain function. Led by scientists at the Weizmann Institute and Carnegie Mellon University, the study shows that the brains of individuals with autism display unique synchronization patterns, something that could impact earlier diagnosis of the disorder and future treatments.  Read more...

Researchers, including Carnegie Mellon professor and CNBC's co-director Marlene Behrmann, have found that the ability to understand different movements, engages different brain mechanisms from those that recognize who is initiating the action. The study illustrates for the first time how individuals with prosopagnosia, or face blindness, are still able to recognize other people's movements.

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Julie Fiez, a neuroscientist at the University of Pittsburgh’s Learning Research and Development Center and a member of the CNBC faculty, presented at Leadership Pittsburgh’s innovative retreat, Unboxed.  Her talk is on the research she did on the part of the brain critical for reading. Called the visual word form area, this node on the lower left side of the brain allows people to interpret whole words and rapidly know what they mean.  

Here is a link to a video of her talk.