BRIEF COURSE SUMMARY
The goal of cognitive science is to explain the operations of the mind – its ability to perceive the world, to think and talk about the world, and to reflect self-consciously about its own thoughts. Cognitive science integrates research from multiple disciplines: cognitive psychology, linguistics, philosophy, computer science, and neuroscience among others. In this course, we examine some of the fundamental questions raised in cognitive science, and how they have been investigated and answered using approaches drawing on these multiple disciplines.

READING
There is no textbook for the course; instead will read primarily journal articles and book chapters that more directly reflect how cognitive science is conducted. The reading assignment should be completed by the class it is assigned for below. Pdf versions of the readings are available through the course website at http://pages.pomona.edu/~rt004747/lgcs11.html

GRADING
Your grade will be determined by two take home exams (30%), your class attendance and participation (10%), presentations by your student group (15%), reading responses (15%), and the final project (30%).

Two take home exams (30% total, 15% each): The exams are take home, open book exams. They will be emailed on Wednesday 10/07 and 12/09 and are due the following Monday by email by the beginning of class. If you use any sources (course reading material, articles, web pages, books, etc.) you need to provide detailed references so that I can find them. Use resources from the web at your own risk! There is a lot of information, not all of it trustworthy (e.g., Wikipedia).

Reading responses (15%): Before each class, you should email me your reaction to and/or questions about the reading. This should not be a summary of the readings but rather a detailed and focused question or a critical, concise, and transparently argued reaction to the reading. Responses are due by email no later than noon before the class that the reading is assigned for (so I have time to read them). Each class at least one response will be read in class as part of the discussion and throughout the semester each student will have at least one of his/her responses read in class.

Class demos (15%): We will form groups of about 3-4 students for the final project. Midway through the semester, each group will do an in-class demonstration of an experimental method described in one of the readings for the class, or otherwise discussed with me.

Final project and in-class presentation (30%): The final project will be (typically) an experimental cognitive science project developed in collaboration with your student group with direction from me. You will form a hypothesis, design the experiment, gather experimental data, and present your findings to the class at the end of the semester. Each individual student must hand in her or his own written report. The style and format of the report will be discussed in class.

Class attendance (10%): If you must miss class because of a field trip etc., please inform me ahead of time. Material presented in class is often not in the reading and will be covered in exams.

Tentative schedule for the semester (download readings from course website):

Tentative schedule for the semester:

Wed 9/02	Introduction
Mon 9/07	Dualism; Consciousness	Descartes: Meditations 1 & 2; Kriegel (2006)
Wed 9/09	Behaviorism	Watson (1913); Breland & Breland (1961)
Mon 9/14	Cognitive Revolution	Chomsky (1959)
Wed 9/16	Functionalism	Turing (1950); Searle (1980)
Mon 9/21	Pragmatics	Grice (1975)
Wed 9/23	Judgment, Reasoning, Decision	Samuels et al. (1999); Bargh & Chartrand (1999)
Mon 9/28	Visual Perception	Palmer (1999) Ch. 1
Wed 9/30	Visual Attention	Treisman (1998)
Mon 10/05	Auditory Perception	Warren (1970); McGurk & MacDonald (1976)
Wed 10/07	Psycholinguistics	Tanenhaus et al. (1995)
	Midterm will be distributed by email
Mon 10/12	NO CLASS; ROBERT AWAY
Wed 10/14	Implicit & False Memory	Schacter (1987); Loftus & Loftus (1980)
Mon 10/19	NO CLASS; FALL RECESS
Wed 10/21	NO CLASS; FALL RECESS
Mon 10/26	Connections & Symbols	McClelland et al. (1986); Pinker & Ullman (2002)
Wed 10/28	Critical Periods in Development	Blakemore & Cooper (1970); Kuhl et al. (1992)
Mon 11/02	Conceptual Development	Hespos & Spelke (2004); Baillargeon (1994)
Wed 11/04	In Class Demos I
Mon 11/09	NO CLASS; ROBERT AWAY
Wed 11/11	In Class Demos II
Mon 11/16	Language Acquisition I	Crain & Thornton (2005); Baker (2003)
Wed 11/18	Language Acquisition II	Tomasello (2000); Senghas & Coppola (2001)
Mon 11/23	Animal Cognition	Hauser et al. (2000); Emery & Clayton (2004); Povinelli & Vonk (2003)
Wed 11/25	NO CLASS; THANKSGIVING
Mon 11/30	Language & Thought	Boroditsky (2003); Levinson (2003)
Wed 12/02	Embodied Cognition; Robotics	Barsalou et al. (2003); Coradeschi et al. (2006)
Mon 12/07	Research Presentations I
Wed 12/09	Research Presentations II
	The final will be distributed by email

Baillargeon, R. (1994). How do infants learn about the physical world? Current Directions In Psychological Science, 3, 133-140. [pdf version]

Bargh & Chartrand (1999). The unbearable automaticity of being. American Psychologist, 54, 462-479. [pdf version]

Barsalou, L.W., Simmons, W.K., Barbey, A.K., & Wilson, C.D. (2003). Grounding conceptual knowledge in modality-specific systems. Trends in Cognitive Science, 7, 84-91. [pdf version]

Blakemore, C., & Cooper, G.F. (1970). Development of brain depends on visual environment. Nature, 228, 477-478. [pdf version]

Boroditsky, L. (2003). Linguistic Relativity. In Nadel (Ed.), Encyclopedia of cognitive science. Macmillan. [pdf version]

Breland, K., & Breland, M. (1961). The Misbehavior of organisms. American Psychologist, 16, 681-684. [pdf version]

Chomsky, N. (1959). Review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior. Language, 35, 26-58. [pdf version]

Coradeschi, S., Ishiguro, H., Asada, M., Shapiro, S., Theilscher, M., Breazeal, C., Mataric, M., & Ishida, H. (2006). Human-Inspired Robots. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 21, 74-85. [pdf version]

Crain, S., & Thornton, R. (2005). Acquisition of syntax and semantics. In M. Traxler and M. Gernsbacher (Eds.), Handbook of psycholinguistics. Amsterdam: Elsevier. [pdf version]

Descartes, R. (1641). Meditations1 and 2. Online at: http://www.wright.edu/cola/descartes/mede.html

Emery, N. J., & Clayton, N. S. (2004). The mentality of crows: Convergent evolution of intelligence in corvids and apes. Science, 306, 1903-1907. [pdf version]

Grice, H.P. (1975). Logic and conversation. In P. Cole and J.L. Morgan (Eds.), Syntax and semantics, volume III: Speech acts. Academic Press. [pdf version]

Hauser, M. D., Carey, S., & Hauser, L. B. (2000). Spntaneous number representation in semi-free-ranging rhesus monkeys. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Science, 267, 829-833. [pdf version]

Hespos, S.J. & Spelke, E.S. (2004). Conceptual precursors to language. Nature, 430, 453-456. [pdf version]

Kriegel, U. (2006). Consciousness, theories of. Philosophy Compass, 1, 58-64. [pdf version]

Kuhl, P.K., Williams, K.A., Lacerda, F., Stevens, K.N., & Lindblom, B. (1992). Linguistic experience alters phonetic perception in infants by 6 months of age. Science, 255, 606-608. [pdf version]

Levinson, S. (2003). Language and mind: Let's get the issues straight! In D. Gentner & S. Goldin-Meadow (Eds.), Language in mind: Advances in the study of language and thought (pp. 25-46). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [pdf version]

Loftus, E.F., & Loftus, G.R. (1980). On the permanence of stored information in the human brain. American Psychologist, 35, 409-420. [pdf version]

McClelland, J.L., Rumelhart, D.E., & Hinton, G.E. (1986). The appeal of parallel distributed processing. In D. Rumelhart, J. McClelland, & the PDP Research Group (Eds.), Parallel distributed processing: Volume 1: Foundations (pp. 3-44). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [pdf version]

McGurk, H., & MacDonald, J. (1976). Hearing lips and seeing voices. Nature, 264, 746-748. [pdf version]

Palmer, S.E. (1999). Vision science: Photons to phenomenology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [pdf version of chapter 1]

Pinker & Ullman (2002). The past and future of the past tense. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 6, 456-463. [pdf version]

Povinelli, D. J., & Vonk, J. (2003). Chimpanzee minds: suspiciously human? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7, 157-160. [pdf version]

Samuels, R., Stitch, S., & Remoulet, P. D. (1999). Rethinking rationality: From bleak implications to Darwinian modules. In Lepore & Pylyshyn (Eds.) What is cognitive science (pp. 74-120)? Blackwell. [pdf version]

Schacter, D.L. (1987). Implicit memory: History and current status. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 13, 501-518. [pdf version]

Searle, J.R. (1980). Minds, brains, and programs. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3, 417-457. [pdf version]

Senghas, A., & Coppola, M. (2001). Children creating language: How Nicaraguan Sign Language acquired a spatial grammar. Psychological Science, 12, 323-328. [pdf version]

Tanenhaus, M.K., Spivey-Knowlton, M.J., Eberhard, K.M. & Sedivy, J.E. (l995). Integration of visual and linguistic information in spoken language comprehension. Science, 268, 1632-1634. [pdf version]

Tomasello, M. (2000). The item-based nature of children's early syntactic development. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 4, 156-163. [pdf version]

Treisman, A. (1998). Feature binding, attention and object perception. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, B: Biological Sciences, 353, 1295-1306. [pdf version]

Turing, A.M. (1950). Computing Machinery and Intelligence. Mind, 49, 433-460. [pdf version]

Warren, R.M. (1970). Perceptual restoration of missing speech sounds. Science, 167, 392-393. [pdf version]

Watson, J.B. (1913). Psychology as the behaviorist views it. Psychological Review, 20, 158-177. [pdf version]