Global Arc

This course examines the scientific study of the way ordinary people think about, feel, and behave in social situations and how they influence, and are influenced by, others around them. We will first examine how people think and feel about others and about themselves; then we explore how they induce others to conform, to comply, to obey, and occasionally to see the world differently. Later, we examine how groups influence individuals and how individuals influence groups, how members of different groups relate to one another, and the seeds of attraction, altruism, and aggression. Two lectures, one preceptorial.

Babies, who look like helpless blobs, are capable of impressive feats of learning. 3-year-olds, who can't cross the street alone, know an astounding amount of information about their environments. We will focus on landmark studies that elucidate how children's biology, cognition, language, and social experiences interact to set the stage for what we do and who we are. Is the baby's world a 'blooming, buzzing confusion', or do babies enter the world prepared to make sense of their environments? How can we understand the collaboration between nature and nurture during development? Two lectures, one preceptorial.

The course will survey discoveries and progress made over the past 50 years of research, from classic experimental findings and fundamental theoretical principles to the cutting edge of research that lies increasingly at the interface of psychology with neuroscience (neural mechanisms underlying cognitive processes), computer science (artificial intelligence and machine learning), and mathematics (formal models of complex processes). Topics will include perception, attention, memory, decision making, reasoning, problem solving, language, and cognitive control. Two lectures, one laboratory.

A survey of major approaches to the study of personality, including psychodynamic, social learning, and trait-theory approaches. The focus will be on the assumptions made by each approach, relevant techniques for collecting and analyzing data, and theoretical and practical implications. Two lectures, one preceptorial.

The goal of this course is to illuminate the interactions between the brain, body and behavior over the course of development and how this shapes a species' evolution. We will first explore developmental events at the cellular level that are shaped by parental behavior. We will then see how these events influence the developing circuits of the brain. Finally, we will learn about influences at the level of niche or culture, where the changes that organisms make to their environments and to themselves influence and modify the patterns of behaviors exhibited in the next generation.

This course will expose students to approaches and methods used in psychology research in an effort to provide foundational knowledge and prepare undergraduates for independent research. The first half of the course will address issues pertinent to all psychology research (experimental design, literature review, ethics, statistics and data interpretation) and the second half of the course will focus on specific approaches and methods used by different subfields of Psychology. The second part of the course will be team-taught by experts in the given area with the assistance of graduate students and postdocs in running the precepts.

Cultural psychology as a discipline strives to understand and identify universal principles of human thought, feeling, and behavior. The major goal of this course is to examine a range of psychological areas from a cross-cultural perspective, designed to provide opportunities to increase awareness and sensitivity to global similarities and differences in human functioning. The course will survey theoretical perspectives, empirical studies, and methodological issues pertaining to psychological study of culture. Topics to be covered include culture and gender, morality, personality, social cognition, motivation, the self, social interaction,

Individuals are rarely isolated from one another. In our day-to-day lives, interactivity is ubiquitous, from communicating with one another, to jointly remembering the past, to coordinating our actions. The course is based on the assumption that exploring humans in interaction will lead to significant advances in understanding the mind, and at the same time it will illuminate the emergent properties of interactive minds at a collective level.

Vision is the dominant sense in humans, and is central to our experience of the world: how we recognize friends, how we navigate campus, how we play sports, how we read, etc. Despite this importance, we take for granted how well vision works. While vision seems effortless, what we see is the product of sophisticated mental processes operating without our awareness. Visual cognition is the branch of cognitive psychology concerned with trying to understand how these processes work. The goal of this course is to provide an advanced introduction to visual cognition, including existing theoretical frameworks and cutting-edge research findings.

This course is an integrative treatment of memory in humans and animals. We explore working memory (our ability to actively maintain thoughts in the face of distraction), episodic memory (our ability to remember previously experienced events), and semantic memory (our ability to learn and remember the meanings of stimuli). In studying how the brain gives rise to different kinds of memory, we consider evidence from behavioral experiments, neuroscientific experiments (neuroimaging, electrophysiology, and lesion studies), and computational models. Two lectures, one preceptorial. Prerequisite: 255 or 259, or instructor's permission.