It is expected that the Master of Arts (MA) thesis will be completed within the first two years in the program. The Master's degree will normally be required before studies for the doctorate are begun.
The main component of the doctoral program is the dissertation. Students are usually assigned to a specific research supervisor when they are admitted to the program based on interests and background. Any of the core or cross-appointed faculty listed on the faculty page can serve as supervisors for the doctoral program. In addition, the adjunct appointees to the department are also occasionally willing to supervise our doctoral students. Completion of the Doctoral dissertation typically requires another three years after completing the MA.
Examples of dissertation research topics in Cognitive Neuroscience
- Holistic face processing across neural and behavioral measures. James Siklos-Whillans, 2025
- Intentional Forgetting: The Role of Retrieval in Encoding. Pelin Tan, 2024
- On Memory for Everyday Symbols. Brady Roberts, 2023  â¶Ä‚â¶Ä‚â¶Ä‚â¶Ä‚â¶Ä‚
- The Persistence of Involuntary Memory: Analyzing Phenomenology, Links to Mental Health, and Content. Ryan Yeung, 2022
- Examining the neural, behavioural, and social responses associated with affective self-referential processing in adults and children. Anna Hudson, 2022
- Individual differences in recogn-eye-zing faces: Behavioural and neural underpinnings of face recognition in neurotypical and autistic adults. Karisa Parkington, 2021
- Perceiving direct and averted gaze during emotion discrimination, affective empathy and affective theory of mind judgements: electrophysiological and behavioural effects. Sarah McCrackin, 2020
- Context reinstatement reconsidered: Investigating boundary conditions of the effect. Christopher Lee, 2020Â
- The benefits and boundary conditions of drawing on episodic memory. Melissa Meade, 2019.
- An exploration of the causes and correlates of boredom. Jhotisha Mugon, 2019
- The desire to act: Exploring situational, dispositional and genetic correlates of a fundamental motivational state. Andriy Struk, 2019.
- The Perceptual Mechanisms of Probability Effects. Syaheed Jabar, 2018.
- Emotions and the Environment: The Variable Effect of Environmental Complexity on Pleasure and Interest. Vedran Dzebic, 2017.
- Adapting to Change: The Role of Priors, Surprise and Brain Damage on Mental Model Updating. Alex Filipowicz, 2017.
- On the mnemonic benefits of drawing. Jeffrey Wammes, 2017
- The Interdependence of Attention, Memory, and Performance Based Reward. Christie Haskell, 2016.
- Neural processing of fearful and happy facial expressions: effects of fixation to facial features and task demands. Karly Neath, 2015.