2010-11 Catalog

The study of how people think about other people and behave toward or around others. Topics include attribution, social cognition, motivation and incentive, social influence, liking, stereotyping, deception, fairness and altruism, and conformity.

A descriptive and theoretical survey of the major forms of psychopathology in children, adolescents, and adults. The course will examine current trends and research in the fields of mental health and psychopathology.

Introduction to the computations made by the brain during economic and social decision making and their neural substrates. First quarter: Signal detection theory. Unconscious and conscious processing. Emotion and the somatic marker hypothesis. Perceptual decision making. Reinforcement learning. Goal and habit learning. Facial processing in social neuroscience. Second quarter: Optimal Bayesian decision making and prospect theory. Standard and behavioral game theory. Evolution and group decision making. Collective decision making by animals. Exploration. Risk learning. Probabilistic sophistication.

This course covers tools and statistical methods used in cognitive neuroscience research. Topics vary from year to year depending on the interests of the students. Recent topics include statistical modeling for fMRI data, experimental design for fMRI, and the preprocessing of fMRI data.

What are the correlates of consciousness in the brain? The course provides a framework for beginning to address this question using a reductionist point of view. It focuses on the neurophysiology of the primate visual system, but also discusses alternative approaches more suitable for work with rodents. Topics to be covered include the anatomy and physiology of the primate's visual system (striate and extrastriate cortical areas, dorsal/ventral distinction, visual-frontal connections), iconic and working memory, selective visual attention, visual illusions, clinical studies (neglect, blind sight, split-brain, agnosia), direct stimulation of the brain, delay and trace associative conditioning, conscious and unconscious olfactory processing, and philosophical approaches to consciousness.

Same as Psy 25, but for graduate credit. Not available for credit toward humanities-social science requirement.

The cornerstone of current progress in understanding the mind, the brain, and the relationship between the two is the study of human and animal cognition. This course will provide an in-depth survey and analysis of behavioral observations, theoretical accounts, computational models, patient data, electrophysiological studies, and brain-imaging results on mental capacities such as attention, memory, emotion, object representation, language, and cognitive development.