Courses

This course provides an introduction to the science of the mind. Everyone knows what it's like to think and perceive, but this subjective experience provides little insight into how minds emerge from physical entities like brains. To address this issue, cognitive science integrates work from at least five disciplines: Psychology, Neuroscience, Computer Science, Linguistics, and Philosophy. This course introduces students to the insights these disciplines offer into the workings of the mind by exploring visual perception, attention, memory, learning, problem solving, language, and consciousness. 

Full details for COGST 1101 - Introduction to Cognitive Science

This section is highly recommended for students who are interested in learning about the topics covered in the main course through writing and discussion. 

Full details for COGST 1104 - WIM: Introduction to Cognitive Science

Overview of the science of language, especially its theoretical underpinnings, methods, and major findings. Areas covered include: the relation between sound and meaning in human languages, social variation in language, language change over time, universals of language, and the mental representation of linguistic knowledge. Students are introduced to a wide variety of language phenomena, drawn not only from languages resembling English, but also from many that appear to be quite unlike English, such as those native to the Americas, Africa, Asia, Australia, and the South Pacific.

Full details for COGST 1105 - Introduction to Linguistics

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.

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

This course will survey a number of famous paradoxes about the nature of time, identity, logic, science, belief, decision, and value. Some of these paradoxes have widely accepted answers, but many do not. Paradoxes include (but are not limited to) Zeno's paradoxes, the sorites paradox, the liar paradox, paradoxes of probability, the doomsday and simulation arguments, Newcomb's puzzle, and the trolley problem. These paradoxes will be used as a stepping stone to deeper philosophical questions. Some of the questions we'll tackle include: Is time real? What is a person? Is infinity coherent? How is science possible? What is knowledge? What is it to be rational? What should we do? Does God exist? And finally, why is death bad?

Full details for COGST 2305 - Puzzles and Paradoxes

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

Focuses on how the scientific study of human memory interfaces with the theory and practice of law.

Full details for COGST 3190 - Memory and the Law

Concepts are properties of individuals that approximately correspond to word meanings. They play a role in Linguistics, Cognitive Science, Philosophy, and Artificial Intelligence.  The course looks at phenomena and accounts of concepts from these different perspectives.   

Full details for COGST 3330 - Problems in Semantics

This course will survey core topics on attention, exploring how it influences what people perceive, what they are aware of, what they remember, and how well they can perform tasks. Original articles presenting behavioral and neuroscientific research on attention will be discussed. In-class demonstrations and presentations will further provide students with a broad understanding of attention and the ability to critically apply attention concepts to their everyday lives.

Full details for COGST 3350 - The Psychology of Attention

Some knowledge of game-theory is essential in today's age of complex decision-making, diplomacy, and corporate strategizing. This course is an introduction to the basic principles of game theory and rational choice. The course is designed for students with an interest in economics, political strategy, moral philosophy, and algorithmic reasoning. Important ideas and concepts, with real-life illustrations, will be discussed. Over the semester students will learn the essential ideas of Nash, Schelling and others, different conceptualizations of equilibrium, such as the Nash equilibrium and subgame perfection, and how they apply to different contexts, such as competition among firms, war, and diplomacy. The course will help us understand everyday phenomena, such as addiction, procrastination and moral dilemmas, and show how reasoning can be a critical input for personal happiness. Students will be introduced to some unresolved paradoxes of rational behavior and encouraged to try to solve them on their own.

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

Seminar on the essential features and qualities of culture and how it impacts human endeavors. Because understanding culture necessarily requires interaction across multiple areas of study, this interdisciplinary seminar will be based on discussions of recent research at the interface of cognitive science and the humanities. Topics may include: animal cultures, the evolution of language, the symbolic revolution, knowledge acquisitions, play, rituals and the arts. 

Full details for COGST 4150 - Culture, Cognition, Humanities

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

The class offers an introduction to the experimental methods and data analysis techniques commonly used in linguistics. Topics covered in the course will include basics of experimental design and statistical inference for hypothesis testing, as well as practical training on a variety of experimental paradigms used in syntax and semantics/pragmatics.

Full details for COGST 4477 - Experimental Methods in Language Sciences

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. The course will introduce core problems and methodologies in NLP, including machine learning, problem design, and evaluation methods.

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 6150 - Culture, Cognition, Humanities

Concepts are properties of individuals that approximately correspond to word meanings. They play a role in Linguistics, Cognitive Science, Philosophy, and Artificial Intelligence.  The course looks at phenomena and accounts of concepts from these different perspectives.   

Full details for COGST 6333 - Problems in Semantics

The class offers an introduction to the experimental methods and data analysis techniques commonly used in linguistics. Topics covered in the course will include basics of experimental design and statistical inference for hypothesis testing, as well as practical training on a variety of experimental paradigms used in syntax and semantics/pragmatics.

Full details for COGST 6477 - Experimental Methods in Language Sciences