The Department maintains extensive facilities for research in a variety of experimental areas including: Animal Behaviour & Learning, Systems and Behavioural Neuroscience, Cognition & Perception, Developmental Psychology, and Social & Evolutionary Psychology.

The Department possesses extensive facilities for human and animal research. The 20,680 square foot state-of-the-art animal facility houses rats, mice, gerbils, fish, cats, insects; and a new bat colony. The procedure rooms include a physiological optical imaging laboratory, transgenic procedure suite, two animal surgery suites, electrophysiology and neurochemistry suites, and an automatic cage washing facility.

The recently renovated 19,700 square feet of human research facilities provide researchers and trainees with access to modern computing resources (Macintosh, Windows, and Linux environments), state-of-the-art eye-tracking systems (head mounted and remote), virtual reality systems, a transcranial magnetic stimulation system, and several electroencephalography (EEG) systems (the largest number of EEG systems in any single department in Canada). Human researchers also enjoy access to a 3T fMR system and an MR compatible EEG system at the Imaging Research Centre in nearby St. Joseph's Hospital through our ongoing collaborations with faculty in the Brain-Body Institute. As well, in conjunction with Brock University, we have created a mobile human electrophysiology and eye-tracking laboratory. This unique mobile facility is particularly useful in ongoing research with special populations, school-aged children, and seniors participants for whom access to our Department-based facilities may be difficult.

In addition to these facilities, the Department maintains a full-time technical staff of 3 persons, available to members of the faculty and their students as required. Departmental technicians are well equipped to construct specialized laboratory apparatus and maintain computers and instrumentation.

Detailed descriptions of the research interests of each member of our faculty and lists of representative publications are available on our graduate studies web site:

• Animal Behaviour
  
• Cognition/Perception
  
• Developmental Psychology
  
• Evolution & Social Behaviour
  
• Systems & Behavioural Neuroscience

All of our graduate students receive financial support from scholarships, fellowships, and teaching assistantships. For the academic year 2008/09 the minimum level of support will be $19,880/yr.

This web page provides an introduction to our program. After reading through this introduction, we hope that you will want to gather more information on the range of possibilities at McMaster that relate to your specific interest in our program.

If you have any questions about our graduate program please contact: riddeln@mcmaster.ca