PSYCHOLOGY 516/COGNITIVE SCIENCE 511 - Spring 2008

SYLLABUS

Course Objectives & Requirements

            There are two major objectives in this course. The first is to introduce you to findings in the broad area of cognitive psychology. The second is to help train you to read and evaluate technical work. Accordingly, you will be assigned background readings from a text to provide a context for a given topic, and technical articles (including some well-known foundational articles) as primary sources. We will spend much time evaluating competing claims, not only with respect to whether a particular theory or model sanctions the set of predictions generated by the experimenter (or whether a particular model adequately represents a theory), but also with respect to whether the experimental methodology is clean enough that alternative explanations of the results remain unlikely. Thus, the second objective requires depth rather than breadth: sufficient familiarity with the minute details of an area that determine confidence in theoretical description. To that end, I want you to start thinking like a scientist: to be able to put any particular article to a rigorous test of adequacy, and to be capable of coming up with proposed solutions for research that fails such a test. Accordingly, part of the course requirements will include a research proposal. In addition to the proposal, however, there will be a midterm and a final. Each will have a take-home component (most likely having to do with an article I will assign to you), although there may also be an in-class short-essay component. The midterm is tentatively scheduled for Tuesday, March 18.

Background Text

            M.W. Eysenck & M.T. Keane, Cognitive Psychology: A student's handbook. 2005 (Fifth Ed., I think). Psychology Press

Readings

            Specific readings will be announced in advance of each topic. To start with, however, we will have an orientation on methodology and some important techniques. So, the first several weeks will involve lectures and discussion on scientific methodologies, details of the Experimental Method, Statistical Considerations, Reaction Time Issues (Speed-Accuracy Tradeoffs; Subtraction and Additive Factors Methodology), Signal Detection Theory, and Cognitive Architectures.

Readings I - Preliminaries

(Background reading: Eysenck & Keane, Ch. 1)

Readings II - Two Cognitive Architectures

Newell, A., Rosenbloom, P. S., & Laird, J. E. (1989). Symbolic architectures for cognition. In M. I. Posner (Ed.), Foundations of cognitive science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (93-131).

Rumelhart, D. E. (1989). The architecture of mind: A connectionist approach. In M. I. Posner (Ed.), Foundations of cognitive science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (133-159).

(The Posner volume is on reserve in the Library under Psychology 516)

McClelland, J.L., & Rogers, T.T. (2003). The parallel distributed processing approach to semantic cognition. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 4, 310-322. (You can link to this at the following URL: http://www-psych.stanford.edu/~jlm/papers/McCRogers03.pdf )

Readings III -Some Methodological Issues

(Background Reading: Chapter 7 in the Posner volume: Bower, G. H., & Clapper, J. P. (1989). Experimental methods in cognitive science. In M. I. Posner (Ed.), Foundations of cognitive science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (245-300).)

Sternberg, S. (1969). The discovery of processing stages: Extensions of Donder's method. Acta Psychologica, 30, 276-315. (on reserve)

Pachella, R.G. (1974). The interpretation of reaction time in information processing research. In B. Kantowitz (Ed.), Human information processing: Tutorials in performance and cognition. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum. (on reserve)

Posner MI (2005) Timing the Brain: Mental Chronometry as a Tool in Neuroscience. PLoS Biol 3(2): e51 (URL for this: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=548951 )

McClelland, J. L. (1978). On the time relations of mental processes: An examination of systems of processes in cascade. Psychological Review, 86, 287-330. (Don't worry about following the mathematical proofs: Try to understand what is happening at a conceptual level.)