F.C. Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging

The Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging is a research institute in the Netherlands. It is located at the campus of the Radboud University Nijmegen and maintains strong ties with the Donders Centre for Cognition (former Nijmegen Institute for Cognition and Information) and the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. It is named after the Dutch ophthalmologist Franciscus Donders (1818 -1889), who was the first scientist to use differences in reaction times to infer differences in cognitive processing. Even today, this is one of the most widely used behavioural measures in psychology and neuroscience.

In order to train young talent in the broad field of cognitive neuroscience, the Donders Institute has established the Donders Graduate School for Cognitive Neuroscience (DGCN), which offers students a high-quality educational programme at both the Master's and the PhD level. The school is intended for the best international students in biology, physics, psycholinguistics, behavioral studies and medicine who are strongly motivated to do research in cognitive neuroscience.

The centre also has an arrangement with Universität Duisburg-Essen to operate a 7T fMRI facility in Essen, at the Kokerei Zollverein, the site of the former Zollverein Coal Mine Industrial Complex. Research at the centre is focussed around neuroimaging techniques such as MEG, EEG and fMRI.

FieldTrip, a Matlab-based toolkit for analysis of MEG and EEG data was originally developed at the Donders Centre.

External resources

• Official website
• Fieldtrip
• Analyze4D
• Donders Graduate School for Cognitive Neuroscience