Courses

This course provides a broad overview of design applied various disciplines, scales, and problem contexts, and how design can offer an alternative, and often more human-centered perspective towards solving the problems around us. With a focus on designing with a human-centered mindset in this age of technology, we will examine topics on the role of design in wearable computing, virtual and tangible interfaces, robotics to biology. We will also apply the lens of design to issues on sustainability, healthy environments, diversity and inclusion, and designing for social good. Each week, through case studies and familiar examples, DEA 1110 explores how designing is part of every discipline.

Full details for COGST 1111 - Making a Difference by Design

Environmental Psychology is an interdisciplinary field concerned with how the physical environment and human behavior interrelate. Most of the course focuses on how residential environments and urban and natural settings affect human health and well-being. Students also examine how human attitudes and behaviors affect environmental quality. Issues of environmental justice and culture are included throughout. Hands-on projects plus exams. Lecture and discussion sections. DEA 1501  - Writing in the major (WIM) option also is available (by instructor permission) for 4 credits.

Full details for COGST 1500 - Introduction to Environmental Psychology

Human-Environment Relations is an interdisciplinary field concerned with how the physical environment and human behavior interrelate. Most of the course focuses on how residential environments and urban and natural settings affect human health and well-being. Students also examine how human attitudes and behaviors affect environmental quality. Issues of environmental justice and culture are included throughout. Hands-on projects plus exams. Lecture and discussion sections. WIM section attend a regular lecture but also meets weekly with a graduate writing tutor. The two principal objectives of WIM section:

Full details for COGST 1501 - Introduction to Environmental Psychology - Writing in the Major

At the turn of the 21st century the age of Embodied Cognition dawned: a reconsideration of relationships between body, brain, and mind. Researchers in philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and cognitive neuroscience challenged the 20th-century dogma that the mind is like a digital computer, and can be studied independently of the body, brain, and world. Researchers turned their attention to the role that bodily experience plays in thinking and learning, and the roles neural systems for perception and action play in cognition. This course views the field of Cognitive Neuroscience through the lens of Embodied Cognition research, and evaluates the extent to which "embodiment" may be passing fad, a useful shift in perspective, or a revolutionary new way of building theories about brain and mind. 

Full details for COGST 2200 - The Human Brain and Mind: An Introduction to Cognitive Neuroscience

Introduction to psychology from a biological perspective, which focuses on brain mechanisms of behavior. Topics include the structure and function of the nervous system, physiological approaches to understanding behavior, hormones and behavior, biological bases of sensation and perception, learning and memory, cognition, emotion, and communication.

Full details for COGST 2230 - Intro to Behavioral Neuroscience

This course will provide you with an overview of how children's cognition develops. We will investigate how cognition develops from many different perspectives. The main perspectives will be biological, genetic-epistemological, socio-cultural, and information-processing ones. This course also will help you to understand how cognition influences other areas of development, including intelligence, development of the self, language, and social development. Finally, different populations will be considered to better understand the roles not only of nature and nurture, but also of how the two interact to influence development.

Full details for COGST 2300 - Cognitive Development

Covers sentential languages, the truth-functional connectives, and their logic; first-order languages, the quantifiers "every" and "some," and their logic.

Full details for COGST 2310 - Introduction to Deductive Logic

A modicum of game-theoretic knowledge is essential in today's age of complex diplomacy and corporate strategizing. This introductory course is meant to familiarize students with the basic principles of game theory and rational choice in strategic environments. Important ideas and concepts, with real-life illustrations, will be discussed. The course is designed for students with an interest in economics, political strategy, policymaking, and the social sciences, in general.

Full details for COGST 3801 - Introduction to Game Theory and Strategic Thinking

Introductory laboratory-based course focusing on basic foundations in translational research on decision making across the lifespan. The course introduces students to hands-on applications of research skills in the context of research on decision making, spanning basic and applied research in law, medicine, behavioral economics, and policy. It focuses on such topics as human subjects protection, working with populations across the lifespan (e.g., children, seniors), database development, working with external partners and stakeholders (e.g., schools, hospitals), and basic concepts and techniques in decision research. Students participate in weekly laboratory meetings in small teams focused on specific projects as well as monthly meetings in which all teams participate. During laboratory meetings, students discuss ongoing research, plans for new studies, and interpretations of empirical findings from studies that are in progress or have been recently completed. New students work closely with experienced students and eventually work more independently. In order to fully grasp how the research projects fit into the broader field, students read relevant papers weekly and write reaction responses. Because several projects are ongoing at all times, students have the opportunity to be involved in more than one study and are assigned multiple tasks such as piloting research paradigms, subject recruitment, data collection, data analysis, and data entry. Students attend a weekly lab meeting for 1.5 hours per week, read pertinent papers, write reaction responses, and work 10.5 hours per week in the laboratory completing tasks that contribute to ongoing research studies.

Full details for COGST 4250 - Translational Research on Decision Making

Laboratory-based course focusing on basic foundations in translational research on the neuroscience of human memory and memory development. Students attend a weekly lab meeting for 1.5 hours per week, read pertinent papers, write reaction responses, and work 10.5 hours per week in the laboratory completing tasks that contribute to ongoing research studies.

Full details for COGST 4265 - Translational Research on Memory and Neuroscience

A seminar series examining current and classical ideas in human sciences and the humanities.  Themes vary from semester to semester

Full details for COGST 4310 - Topics in Cognitive Science

People experience and remember complex and dynamic environments as events. This seminar draws on work from cognitive neuroscience to characterize how people shape experience into events, and how these processes support adaptive behavior. The course will start with discussions of historical and modern perspectives about the relationships between minds, bodies, and experience.  We will then cover topics ranging from the perception of motion and causality to social learning and interaction. The primary goals are for you to be able to (1) read and evaluate research in psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience, and (2) describe and understand the implications of this research for how minds and bodies are adapted to everyday situations.

Full details for COGST 4331 - Event Cognition: How Minds, Brains and Bodies Experience Events

Experience in planning, conducting, and reporting independent laboratory, field, and/or library research in an interdisciplinary area relevant to Cognitive Science.

Full details for COGST 4700 - Undergraduate Research in Cognitive Science

Provides a research workshop in which undergraduate students who are engaged in research in a particular area relevant to cognitive science can meet across disciplines to learn and practice the essentials of research using interdisciplinary approaches. In this workshop, students critique and discuss the existing literature in a field of inquiry, individual students present their research designs, methods, and results from their independent research studies, debate the interpretation of their research results, and participate in the generation of new research hypotheses and designs, in a peer group of other undergraduate students involved in related research.

Full details for COGST 4710 - Cognitive Science Research Workshop

This course constitutes an introduction to natural language processing (NLP), the goal of which is to enable computers to use human languages as input, output, or both. NLP is at the heart of many of today's most exciting technological achievements, including machine translation, automatic conversational assistants and Internet search. Possible topics include methods for handling underlying linguistic phenomena (e.g., syntactic analysis, word sense disambiguation and discourse analysis) and vital emerging applications (e.g., machine translation, sentiment analysis, summarization and information extraction). 

Full details for COGST 4740 - Natural Language Processing

This hands-on laboratory course will develop research skills in the context of risk and rational decision making in human development from multiple disciplinary perspectives and with respect to different kinds of decision-making under risk and uncertainty.  Topics will depend on student interests but may include decisions about war, terrorism, cancer control and prevention (e.g., screening tests), personal behaviors that involve risk (e.g., HIV prevention), and other public health risks (e.g., vaccinations), law enforcement (e.g., use of a weapon), and legal decision making (e.g., jury deliberations). Students will read the research literature, discuss the latest empirical findings and scientific theories of risk and rationality, and engage in group work and peer review to hone their skills.  Students will then design research projects and engage in research activities as well as read additional references tailored to their interests.

Full details for COGST 6020 - Research in Risk and Rational Decision Making

Full details for COGST 6331 - Event Cognition: How Minds, Brains and Bodies Experience Events