Description

Cognitive science promises to solve the greatest mystery of our age: the human brain. The brain holds the key to how we perceive the world, learn from our experiences, make the right decisions and communicate with others. Understanding the constraints and peculiarities of what it means to be human is key to creating technology that successfully interacts with and amazes people. This course will discuss classic as well as current research studies. We will discuss research in several areas of cognition: Research methods from behavioral experimentation to brain imaging: using examples from visual and auditory perception. Models of memory and attention: how we manage complexity in tasks and knowledge. Language processing: models from experimental and big-data psycholinguistics. Cognitive biases in decision-making: the human as a not-so-rational animal. Decision-making under uncertainty: rationalism and heuristics & biases, game theory. ?Topics will be introduced with audiovisual experiments, patient videos, functional brain imaging data, and real-world examples. Students will read and discuss research papers, typically a mix of classic ones considered foundational for the field, and recent ones to illustrate ongoing discussions.