M.Sc. Psychology with a focus on Experimental Psychology and Neuroscience

Orientation and goals

The program is designed for students who wish to pursue a research-oriented master's degree in psychology after a BSc in psychology. This master meets the recommendations of the DGPs for a consecutive program in psychology: A BSc in psychology is the prerequisite for this master. The research-oriented Master's program focuses on experimental psychology and neuroscience. It also teaches skills that are considered central for a psychologist, in particular psychological diagnostics and methods. Most importantly, the program deepens the practice of the research process (design, planning, implementation, evaluation) and the techniques of experimentation, especially programming, analysis, and modeling, in parallel with expanding knowledge of current research in experimental psychology, neuropsychology, and cognitive neuroscience. Other practical elements include neuropsychological diagnosis, assessment, and technology-assisted rehabilitation. One focus is on the assessment of cognitive processes using and in the context of digital technologies.

In addition to developing expertise in experimental psychology and neuroscience, the program places particular emphasis on acquiring practical research and application skills. These include, in particular, the use of technology in the context of psychological research (e.g., psychophysics, eye-tracking, EEG, fMRI, VR, patient:inpatient studies), mastery of the analysis pipeline (including processing, filtering, aggregating, transforming, modeling, statistical evaluation, and visualization of data), acquisition of solid practical knowledge of scientific programming to control experiments and analysis of data (currently, in particular, Python, Matlab, R), and practice in the use of open-source analysis packages.

Contents and structure

The program is mainly divided into three study areas.

Study Area I teaches and deepens neurocognitive methods and advanced data analysis. Experimental and Analysis Programming I lays the foundations for programming experiments (Python, Matlab) through a lecture with exercise; Experimental and Analysis Programming II builds on this and deals with programming analysis pipelines. The lecture series Neurocognitive Methods deals with a neurocognitive method (e.g. psychophysics, reaction time measurement, EEG, pupillometry, skin conductance, eye tracking, fMRI). Genuinely psychological statistical methods are complemented by advanced analysis of research data from the field of Data Science. In the Neurocognitive Project, the research-practical integration of the methods/programming seminars takes place.

Study Area II focuses on neuroscience in basic and applied aspects. The Cognitive Neuroscience lecture series provides an overview of current topics, which are explored in depth in two seminars on selected topics in cognitive neuroscience. The content follows a broad concept of cognition as information processing and includes, for example, attention, memory, perception, motivation, and emotion. The parallel module Clinical Neuroscience and Neuropsychology deals with functional neuroanatomy, dysfunction, and rehabilitation with an emphasis in technology-assisted procedures, and includes seminars on basic, advanced, and expert assessment and report writing.

Study Area III covers general psychological competencies and consists of an in-depth study of psychological methods, psychological diagnosis, and other in-depth courses from across psychology.

Various elements of personality development, individualization, internationalization and interdisciplinarity are bundled in the competence module. An important component is, in addition to the participation in international, also interdisciplinary lectures, the perception of a mentoring by the professors involved in the study program.