- Degree
- Master of Science
- Course location
- Bielefeld
- Teaching language
- • English
- Languages
- Courses are held in English (100%). The Master's thesis has to be written in English.
- Programme duration
- 4 semesters
- Beginning
- Winter semester
- Application deadline
- Applications can be submitted between 1 June and 15 July of every year via the application portal of the university, HisInOne (https://campus.uni-bielefeld.de/qisserver/pages/cs/sys/portal/hisinoneStartPage.faces).
International students are particularly encouraged to apply early.
The admission procedure has two steps, an eligibility check ("Zugangsprüfung") and a ranking procedure for limited admission of 14 students per year ("Zulassung").
- Tuition fees per semester in EUR
- None
- Combined Master's degree / PhD programme
- No
- Joint degree / double degree programme
- No
- Description/content
- Brains are among the most complex systems in nature. They control perception, cognition and eventually the behaviour of animals and humans. Understanding the mechanisms that allow animals and humans to behave adaptively in complex environments is one of the most fascinating, but also most challenging tasks in science.
The graduate programme "Behaviour: From Neural Mechanisms to Evolution" provides the relevant interdisciplinary scientific training for a comprehensive education. It introduces concepts, fundamental experimental techniques, and theoretical approaches that are required to perform research at the frontiers of this ambitious scientific field.
The study programme aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the fundamental principles underlying autonomous adaptive behaviour in animals and humans. It bridges the gap from neurophysiology to behavioural ecology. This goal is reached by relating two basic aspects that are usually treated separately.
• Computational Aspect: Behaviour is the result of computations performed by the nervous system of the organism at all relevant levels of complexity. These comprise the cellular and network level as well as the cognitive and behavioural performance of the entire system.
• Evolutionary Aspect: Brain morphology and function as well as the innate and learnt behaviours of animals and humans emerge from the developmental and everyday interactions of the organism with its environment. They have been shaped by selection in the course of evolution.
As a distinguishing characteristic, this study programme focuses on both computational and evolutionary explanations of behaviour and highlights their mutual relationship.
Although the interdisciplinary study programme is centred in the Faculty of Biology, a selection of curricular modules may also be selected from other fields such as psychology, computer science, robotics or linguistics. Some of the groups involved in the graduate programme are affiliated with the Centre for Cognitive Interaction Technology (http://www.cit-ec.de (http://www.cit-ec.de)).