Courses
Taught
Psyc 100H (General Psychology Honors): Psychology 100H gives students a broad overview of the field of psychological science. It consists of assigned readings in the text, class lectures, and exposure to the research methods employed by psychological scientists. The lectures do not merely repeat what you can read in the text, but present you with a clearer understanding of concepts and issues, why the issues are considered important, and how researchers resolve them. The lectures are also your guide to what sections of each chapter your instructor believes are most important. These are the sections that will be emphasized on exams.
The course is divided into four (4) parts. Part I introduces you to psychological science, the nature of psychological research, the biological bases of behavior, and the study of sensory processes. Part II covers the topics of perception, consciousness, learning, and memory. Part III explores the topics of cognition, development, intelligence, motivation, and emotion. Part IV focuses on stress, theories of personality, psychological disorders, and the treatment of those disorders.
Psyc 366 (Research in Infant Cognition): Scholars from different fields including psychological science, cognitive science, computer science, linguistics, neuroscience, and philosophy are interested in understanding the mechanisms of higher mental function. Some of these scholars have turned their research efforts toward defining the initial cognitive state of the human organism. Studying the beginnings of cognition in early infancy presents a formidable set of empirical challenges; however, investigators of young infants share a belief that fundamental perceptual and cognitive capacities may be more accessible in the infant than in the adult. The expression of these capacities is not obscured by the layers of acquired knowledge and idiosyncratic processing strategies characteristic of adult cognition.
The course is taught in a seminar-lab format. The seminar portion of the course runs throughout the term and consists of discussions of primary source research papers. Students also formulate a research proposal based on the instructor’s ongoing studies. The first day of lab focuses on mastering eye fixation recording techniques used in infant research; the remaining portion of the lab is devoted to collecting relevant data from human infant research participants (or coding new dependent measures from existing data), analyzing these data, and completing final oral and poster reports describing the rationale behind the study, as well as the major findings and conclusions.
The course gives students an opportunity to engage in advanced readings, think deeply and critically about the issues raised in the readings, and conduct empirical research in a laboratory setting under the direction of a faculty sponsor. The course exposes students to the Classroom Seminar-Laboratory Research Model of graduate education in the sciences. Inasmuch as students are exposed to the graduate school model of a “research apprenticeship”, the course is valuable to students planning to enter doctoral programs in psychological science, cognitive science, and neuroscience.
Psyc 467/667 (Seminar in Infant Cognition): The course provides an overview of selected aspects of perceptual and cognitive development during the infancy period defined broadly here as the first two years of life. Special emphasis is placed on the acquisition of knowledge including the abilities of human infants to organize what they see into coherent wholes, to represent properties of hidden objects, to form category representations for classes of objects, spatial relations, and people, to build non-obvious cognitive and social concepts from perceptual categories, and to represent the sound structure of human language. Concern is also given to some possible constraints on early knowledge acquisition, such as the biological limitations of sensory systems, the operation of perceptual-cognitive biases that enable rapid learning, and innate limits on human thought. A range of theoretical descriptions of infant development are considered including Piaget and the modern discontinuity theorists, constructivism and the efforts to model development in connectionist learning systems, and various forms of nativism from the selectionism of Edelman and Changeux to Fodor’s radical nativism.