The 4th National Symposium on Brain and Cognitive Sciences was held successfully from 24 to 28 November, 2009 in Chengdu, China. The meeting was organized by the State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Sciences (SKLCS), the Neurobiophysics and Neural Informatics Committee of the Biophysical Society of China (BSC), and the Ministry of Education Key Laboratory of Neuroinformatics of the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC). More than 200 delegates from universities and research institutions all over the country attended the meeting.

The opening ceremony in the morning of November 24 was presided over by Professor Xiaolan Fu, deputy director of SKLCS. After the opening remarks given by Professor Caidong Xiong, Vice President of UESTC, Professor Lin Chen, SKLCS Director and academician briefed the themes of previous symposia and emphasized the important role of brain imaging technology in advancing the development of brain and cognitive sciences.

The plenary session was featured with three invited keynote presentations by renowned scientists. The ensuing two branch meetings were convened at different venues at the same time, which focused on 8 such topics as sensory information processing and its neural mechanisms, perception and attention, other level cognitive processes, intelligent information processing and the brain and cognition, imaging methods and technology of brain cognition, brain dysfunctional diseases, cognitive dysfunction and neurodegenerative mechanism, disaster psychology, and emotion and social cognition. A total of 150 abstracts were received by the meeting, out of which 140 abstracts will be published in an extra edition of the Acta Biophysica Sinica. The symposium supplied a good platform for scientific exchanges in related fields and at the same time offered great learning opportunities for young scholars and graduate students.