About us

The Department of Cognitive Neurology (DCN), headed by Prof. Dr. P. Thier, was founded in the year 2000 with support from the program “C4-Department of Neuroscience at Neurology Clinics“ of the Hermann and Lilly-Schilling Foundation. In the year 2002, in which the Neurology Clinic was reorganized, the DCN became a constitutional part of the newly founded twin institutions, namely the Center of Neurology and the Hertie Institute for Clinical Brain Research. In the beginning of 2004, it was reinforced by the formation of a Section on Neuropsychology associated with a professorship for neuropsychology both taken over by Prof. Dr. Dr. H.-O. Karnath. In summer 2008 the Section on Computational Sensomotorics, headed by the newly appointed W3-professor Dr. Martin Giese and funded by the German Research Council within the framework of the Excellence Cluster “Centre for Integrative Neuroscience”, was installed at the department.

The DCN is devoted to research on the basis of higher brain functions and their disturbances due to disease of the nervous system. To this end, the DCN adopts multifarious approaches: the consequences of circumscribed brain lesions are analyzed using classical neuropsychological techniques in conjunction with state-of-the-art psychophysical, behavioral and brain imaging methods. In order to explore the neuronal underpinnings of higher human brain functions in more detail, primate as well as rodent models are used, allowing recording of single- and multi-neuron signals and the correlation of these signals with well-defined behaviors or perceptual states as well as the targeted manipulation of neurons and neuronal circuits and their consequences for function. In-vitro techniques such as whole cell patch clamp recordings from isolated brain slices are being applied in an attempt to characterize the membrane and synaptic properties of identified neurons participating in neuronal circuits underlying higher brain functions, such as learning and memory. In close collaboration with the interdisciplinary centers for magnetoencephalography and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) at the Medical Faculty functioning imaging experiments are carried out that tie up the behavioral experiments on patients with brain lesions, on the one hand, and experiments on animal models, on the other hand.

Several members of the DCN are engaged in the newly etablished excellence cluster “Werner Reichardt Centre for Integrative Neuroscience (CIN)”,  coordinated by P. Thier.

Two former young investigator groups changed their status in 2008: the first one is the young investigator group on “Neuronal mechanisms of numerical categories and concept formation”, set up within the framework of the SFB 550 and headed by Prof. Dr. A. Nieder who became chairman of the Department of Animal Physiology at the University of Tübingen and moved his group to the Institute of Zoology. The second one on the “Representation of action and learning”, headed by Prof. Dr. M. Giese and funded by the Volkswagen Foundation until 2007, turned into the Section on Computational Sensomotorics funded by the DFG within the framework of the Excellence Cluster “Werner Reichardt Centre for Integrative Neurosience (CIN)”. Another two former young investigator groups, supported by the BMBF program “Biofuture 2000” (PD Dr. C. Schwarz) and the Heisenberg program of the DFG respectively (Prof. Dr. U. Ilg), are being continued as independent research groups within the DCN. All members of the DCN contribute significantly to research-oriented teaching at the International Graduate School for Neural and Behavioural Sciences. Further teaching is deployed at the Faculties of Biology (Prof. Dr. U. Ilg) and Informatics (Prof. Dr. M. Giese and Dr. W. Ilg) and, of course, at Tübingen Medical School. In 2008 Prof. Dr. U. Ilg became Director of the newly established “Schülerlabor Neurowissenschaften” that provides unique training opportunities for high school students and their teachers. Dr. M. Himmelbach, a young investigator at the Neuropsychology Section could establish his own research group within the framework of a European Research Grant. Dr. A. Lindner from the California Institute of Technology returned to the DCN, where he obtained his PhD in 2004. He is currently installing a young investigator group at the department.