Tentative Syllabus
Latest update: 8/27/02
The following is an approximate syllabus for the semester. (Most likely,
there will be some minor changes as we go along.) The planned readings are
listed in brackets; we'll probably add a few more readings as the course
proceeds.
8/26 Intro to class: Classical cognitive science
8/28 The computational metaphor [Gardner, Meno]
9/2 NO CLASS (Labor day)
9/4 The computational metaphor: the Turing test [Turing, Searle]
9/9 Problem solving
9/12 Problem solving/search [Newell and Simon] PS 1 due
9/16 Problem solving/search
9/18 Neural Nets and connectionism
9/23 Neural Nets and connectionism [Bechtel and Abrahamsen] PS 2 due
9/25 Semantic Nets; memory
9/30 Memory [Schacter]
10/2 Judgment/decision-making/probability [Tversky and Kahneman]
10/7 Judgment/decision-making [Piatelli-Palmarini; Gigerenzer] PS 3 due
10/9 Vision [Marr]
10/14 Vision [Biederman]
10/16 Mental imagery [Gardner; Kosslyn]
10/21 Mental imagery PS 4 due
10/23 Spatial/physical/commonsense reasoning
10/28 Cognitive neuroscience [Gazzaniga]
10/30 Cognitive neuroscience [Sacks]
11/4 Embodied cognition [Lakoff; Clark]
11/6 Embodied cognition; animal cognition [Braitenberg; Brooks] PS 5
due
11/11 Infant cognition [Gopnik]
11/13 Infant cognition
11/18 Game theory [Axelrod]
11/20 Game theory [Pinker] PS 6 due
11/25 Evolutionary psychology [Cosmides and Tooby]
11/27 No Class (Friday schedule)
12/2 Evolutionary psychology [Dawkins]
12/4 Language/language acquisition [Chomsky] PS 7 due
12/9 Language/language acquisition [Jackendoff]
12/11 Consciousness Final paper due