Global Arc

In this class we will explore gender and sex diversity in humans. We will read and listen to classic medical cases and scientific studies, anthropological reports, the first-person narrative accounts of intersex and nonbinary adults, and podcasts from expert researchers. Throughout the class we will dive into deep ethical dilemmas emerging in the current cultural moment and learn what social and life scientists think about these topics to develop our own views.

The neural basis of behavior reinforcement, including brain mechanisms for incentive motivation, response selection and addiction. The focus at the physiological level will be on energy regulation. At the neuroscience level, discussions will delve into sensory-motor integration in the hindbrain, the hypothalamus and the basal ganglia in the control of instrumental behavior. The representative behaviors studied will be eating and drug abuse. Related clinical topics to be discussed include eating disorders, sugar addiction, depression and alcohol abuse. Students will give oral reports on biomedical research, leading to a term paper.

A survey of the unique behaviors of different animal species and how they are mediated by specialized brain circuits. Topics include, for example, monogamy in voles, face recognition in primates, sex- and role-change in fish, and predation by bats. The role of evolutionary and developmental constraints on neural circuit construction will be a key underlying theme. Prerequisites: 258 or 259. One three-hour seminar.

This course explores the neural foundations of social cognition and social emotions. The objective is to provide a comprehensive overview of research topics relevant to the emerging field of social neuroscience. We will also discuss questions that cut across the specific topics that will be covered. Do neural systems exist that are specialized for social cognition or do the systems that participate in social cognition have more general cognitive functions? Can neuroscientific research shed new light on social cognition? How can different disciplines in neuroscience and the social sciences contribute to social neuroscience research?

Seminar designed to expose students to a modern, integrative view of animal learning phenomena from experimental psychology, through the lens of computational models and current neuroscientific knowledge. At the psychological level, we will concentrate on classical and instrumental conditioning. Computationally, we will view these as exemplars of prediction learning and action selection, the pillars of reinforcement learning. Neurally, we will focus on the roles of dopamine and the basal ganglia at the systems level. Students will see how the study of animal decision making can inform us about the computations that take place in the brain.

Decision-making is ubiquitous to everyday life and crucial to survival. Good choice is subject to evolutionary selection; poor choice accompanies many neurological and psychiatric disorders. But theoretical understanding of a function is needed to manipulate and measure it experimentally. Recently, this has led scientists studying choice to seek insights from economics. This course explores how humans and animals make decisions, focusing on how psychological and neural mechanisms implement, or fail to implement, economic theories of choice. We consider choice in many sorts of tasks; eg, in animal foraging and human competitive interactions.

Adversity is a powerful force in the human experience. From scarcity, to disasters, to marginalization, experiences of adversity play a pivotal role in how people think, feel, and act. This seminar will explore the psychological consequences of adversity, including its effects on beliefs, attitudes, decision-making, morality, self and identity, health and well-being, close relationships, and communities. We will consider not only the deleterious effects of adversity, but also how it can foster resilience, strengthen ties, and spark creativity. The course will balance psychological theories and research with personal and historic narratives.

Face perception is one of the most important visual skills humans have. Given their distinctive evolutionary and social significance, faces have long been considered a special object category, which relies on unique cognitive and neural mechanisms. The aim of the course is to expose students to most up-to-date knowledge that will allow understanding of how this unique information is processed and integrated in the brain and what happens when face perception is impaired. Moreover, cognitive and neural models will be discussed in light of recent computational advancements, which enable state-of the-art, human-like face recognition.

The purpose of the course is to provide in-depth coverage of some of the most popular statistical methods used in psychological research. This course will be particularly beneficial to students as they consider how to design and analyze their senior thesis. Also, for those students interested in graduate school in Psychology, this course will provide an extremely solid foundation for graduate-level work in research and statistics. More generally, this course will provide students with critical thinking skills that will prove beneficial in many domains. This course is open to PSY concentrators only.

The objective of this course is to provide advanced students in cognitive science, psychology, and computer science with the skills to develop computational models of human cognition. Computational modeling is one of the central methods in cognitive science research, and can help to provide insight into how people solve the challenging problems posed by everyday life, as well as how to bring computers closer to human performance for some of these problems. The course will explore three ways in which researchers have attempted to formalize cognition-symbolic approaches, neural networks, and probability and statistics.