Global Arc

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.

Principles of psychology relevant to the theory and practice of education. Through selected readings, discussion, and classroom observations, students study theories of development, learning, cognition (including literacy), and motivation, as well as individual and group differences in these areas; assessment; and the social psychology of the classroom. The course focuses on how learning by children and adolescents at the elementary, middle, and secondary school levels is influenced by their own characteristics and experiences and the various contexts in which they learn: family, school, community and culture. One three-hour seminar.

Music is universal to all cultures, but mysterious because it communicates emotions without recourse to pictures or propositions. Its creation and perception depend on properties of the human mind that the course aims to explain. It focuses on tonal music - from the Baroque to rock, but it also considers atonal music, jazz, and music from other cultures. It describes the cognitive structures underlying the perception of rhythm and meter, melody, consonance and dissonance, harmony, and polyphony; and it aims to elucidate their role in composition and improvisation. It considers their computational modeling and their experimental investigation.

The cognitive processes underlying the use and understanding of language, and in learning to speak. Topics include speech production and perception, grammar and meaning, knowledge and words, and pragmatic aspects of language. Two lectures, one preceptorial.

The study of human problem solving, reasoning, and decision making. Phenomena of interest include thinking in everyday situations and contexts as well as in more specialized areas, such as logic, mathematics, and the sciences. Two lectures, one preceptorial. Prerequisite: 255 or instructor's permission.

An examination of the fundamental theories of belief and decision, from both the normative and descriptive perspectives. Utility, logic, probability, and abduction will be considered, with additional topics drawn from computability theory and from collective choice. Two lectures, one preceptorial.

Considers how one infers the motives, dispositions, and abilities of other persons. Next examines how these inferential processes are used to draw inferences about oneself. Students will design an original experiment (with consultation). Two lectures, one preceptorial. Prerequisite: 252 or instructor's permission.