9.00SC | Fall 2011 | Undergraduate

Introduction to Psychology

Syllabus

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About this Course

This course is designed to introduce you to the scientific study of human nature. You will learn how psychologists ask questions from several different perspectives: questions about the relation of brain and behavior, about perception, about learning and thinking, about development, about social behavior and personality, and about psychopathology and psychotherapy. You will also learn about the methods psychologists use to find the answers to these questions and become acquainted with many of the important findings and theoretical approaches in the field of psychology. By the time it’s over, we hope that you will have learned to think critically about psychological evidence, and to evaluate its validity and its relevance to important issues in your life.

Meet Prof. John Gabrieli

Prerequisites and Preparation

This introductory college undergraduate course has no specific course prerequisites. It designed to be most useful to people with knowledge of the following subjects at the level typically taught in U.S. high schools:

  • Mathematics
    • Experimental data collection and visual representations of data in graphs and tables
    • Basic probability and statistics: e.g. average, median, distribution, variance
  • Natural sciences
    • Biology of the human nervous system
    • Physics of light and sound
  • Literacy
    • Ability to read and effectively use textbooks

Course Components and Requirements

This course consists of the following components:

  • Assigned readings
  • Lectures
  • Small-group discussion sections
  • Three exams
  • Writing assignments

Assigned Readings

Assigned readings are provided for each class session. You should do the reading prior to watching the lecture video and subsequent activities.

You may use either of the following psychology textbooks. For each class session, we have listed the equivalent readings in each book. Some chapters span multiple lectures, for which you might begin by skimming the entire chapter and then read the relevant sections.

TEXTBOOK DESCRIPTION
[K&R] = Kosslyn, Stephen M., and Robin S. Rosenberg. Introducing Psychology: Brain, Person, Group. 4th Edition. Pearson Education, 2010. ISBN: 9780558882846.

This textbook is used by students enrolled in the class at MIT. It presents a large amount of material at a fairly demanding reading level.

While OCW cannot provide online access to this book, we do present for each class session:

  • Study outlines of each chapter prepared by one of the course TAs.
  • “Further Study” links to supplemental study materials for a related textbook by the same authors.
[Stangor] = Stangor, Charles. Introduction to Psychology (PDF - 14.0MB). 2010. (Courtesy of Charles Stangor and the Saylor Foundation.) This Creative Commons-licensed text is a free online alternative to the Kosslyn and Rosenberg text used in the class at MIT.

Some class sessions also include reading assignments in:

  • [Sacks] = Sacks, Oliver. The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat. Simon & Schuster, 1998. ISBN: 9780684853949.

Lectures

Videos of the twice-weekly lectures are provided.  For your convenience, each lecture can be viewed in a sequence of shorter chapters, or as a single continuous program.  Lecture slides and some supporting resources (e.g. video clips and handouts used in class) are also provided.

Discussion Sections

At MIT, the twice-weekly lectures are complemented by a weekly small group discussion section led by a teaching assistant. We present selected material from these discussions on about half of the lecture pages, starting with Discussion: Brain. This content includes transcripts of short talks by TA Tyler Perrachione, additional Check Yourself quiz content, and bigger Think About questions to ponder and discuss with your friends.

Exams

Each exam covers about a third of the course material; the exams are not cumulative. Each exam consists of multiple-choice questions and short-answer questions based on the text and lectures. A solution key is provided for each exam, so that you can check your answers. Additional exam questions from other years are also provided as study aids.

Writing Assignments

At MIT, enrolled students are given two substantial writing assignments during the semester, plus an optional Extra Credit assignment. Each is an original analysis of a few scientific source readings on a controversial topic in psychology.

Writing Assignment 1: Are studies of cognitive and emotional developments in adolescents useful for setting public policy guidelines, such as juvenile access to abortion and the juvenile death penalty?

Writing Assignment 2: Are “recovered” memories real memories or false memories?

Extra Credit Writing Assignment: Is it ethical to use cognition-enhancing drugs?

For the OCW student, we present these writing assignments as optional, in the spirit of “further study.” Due to copyright restrictions, OCW is only able to provide links to some of the source readings.

Writing guidelines:

  1. Develop your own idea about what is the best interpretation of the findings you read about;
  2. Briefly summarize the main points of the controversy (about half a page to a page);
  3. Explain which position you find more convincing and why.

Grading

At MIT, grading was based on 60% from the exams, 30% from the two papers, and 10% on discussion section participation.

Acknowledgements

This course includes substantial contributions from several talented 9.00SC teaching assistants. Read more » 

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This page content is courtesy of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, used with permission.

Biography

John Gabrieli is the director of the Athinoula A. Martinos Imaging Center at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research. He is an Investigator at the Institute, with faculty appointments in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, where he holds the Grover Hermann Professorship. He also co-directs the MIT Clinical Research Center and is Associate Director of the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, MGH/MIT, located at Massachusetts General Hospital. Prior to joining MIT, he spent 14 years at Stanford University in the Department of Psychology and Neurosciences Program. Since 1990, he has served as Visiting Professor, Department of Neurological Sciences, Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Hospital and Rush Medical College. He received a Ph.D. in Behavioral Neuroscience in the MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences in 1987 and B.A. in English from Yale University in 1978.

Research

Images of mind

John Gabrieli’s goal is to understand the organization of memory, thought, and emotion in the human brain. By combining brain imaging with behavioral tests, he studies the neural basis of these abilities in human subjects. In collaboration with clinical colleagues, Gabrieli also seeks to understand the brain abormalities that underlie neurological and psychiatric disease.

In search of memory

A central theme of Gabrieli’s research is memory in its different forms: the short-term recall that allows us to dial a phone number, our long-term memory of events and places, and the emotional associations that often color our factual memories. These different types of memory are mediated by different brain systems, and Gabrieli seeks to tease these systems apart and understand how they interact to shape our overall sense of the past.

Memory declines in old age, especially with Alzheimer’s disease. One aim of Gabrieli’s current research is to predict from brain scans who will develop Alzheimer’s disease and when they will develop it — an important goal for guiding treatment and for testing the effectiveness of new drugs.

At the other end of life, Gabrieli studies how memory emerges during childhood. As brain imaging technology improves, it becomes possible to scan children at ever younger ages. This will open the door to many new questions about normal human development as well as developmental disorders such as dyslexia or autism. In fact, Gabrieli will head an ambitious new project to study the origins of dyslexia, supported by a grant from the Ellison Medical Foundation.

The origins of psychiatric disease

Neuroimaging can also provide new insights into psychiatric disorders such as depression and schizophrenia. Gabrieli has collaborated with colleagues at McLean Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital to examine abnormal patterns of activity in the brains of psychiatric patients. In the future he plans to combine neuroimaging with genetic studies to understand how genes and environmental factors interact within the brain to produce psychiatric disease.

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Sara Beach

Sara Beach is a technical assistant in Professor John Gabrieli’s lab. She uses EEG and MRI to study reading development, with the aim of identifying early predictors of dyslexia. Her other research interests include bilingualism and cognition, and second language acquisition across the lifespan. A former teacher of English as a Second Language, Sara holds a BA from Williams College and master’s degrees from UPenn and Harvard.

Joseph Keller

Joseph Keller grew up in the Baltimore metro area and is currently a graduate student in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT. He obtained a B.S. in Biological Sciences from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County as a Meyerhoff Scholar, and an M.A. in Cognitive and Neural Systems from Boston University. He is currently pursuing his Ph.D. in the Gabrieli lab and uses neuroimaging techniques to examine the human brain during healthy aging and dementia. In his free time, he enjoys staying active with basketball, golf and squash.

Joanne Liu

Joanne Liu graduated from MIT in 2011 with a B.S. in Brain and Cognitive Sciences. As an undergraduate, Joanne was a research student in the laboratory of Dr. Earl K. Miller and worked on a project examining the differences in neural activity across the brain during the learning of novel categories. She is currently a student in the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University and is pursuing further research in the role of omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acid status on mood disorders. In her free time, Joanne enjoys playing the piano and writing music.

Joshua B. Manning

Joshua B. Manning received his B.F.A in music composition in 2000 from Carnegie Mellon University. He then earned his M.S. in Public Policy and Management in 2006 and his M.F.A in Music Composition in 2009 from Carnegie Mellon University. During his graduate work at Carnegie Mellon he collaborated on research projects involving economics and organizational behavior at the H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and the Tepper School of Business. He is currently a fourth year graduate student at the Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department at MIT. His research interests include the cognitive and neural processes involved in emotion, learning, and decision making under risk and uncertainty, neuroeconomics, and the role of emotion on intertemporal choice and decision making.

Tyler Perrachione

Tyler Perrachione is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, working in the laboratory of Dr. John Gabrieli. Tyler’s research investigates human communication from a systems neuroscience perspective, with a focus on development and disorders of language. His published work includes behavioral and brain imaging studies of language learning, voice recognition, and developmental reading disorders (dyslexia). Tyler has helped teach 9.00 for four years, and has received two teaching awards at MIT in recognition of his dedication to undergraduate education.

Melissa Troyer

Melissa Troyer grew up in Kokomo, IN, where she graduated from a small county public school before attending Indiana University in Bloomington. At IU, Melissa studied language and cognition from several approaches, earning a B.S. in Cognitive Science, a B.S. in Psychology, and a joint B.A. in Linguistics and French. As an undergraduate, Melissa was a computer programmer in an EEG lab and worked as a research assistant for three years in a speech perception laboratory. After graduating, she began the Ph.D. program in the Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT to work on sentence processing. She will receive her Master’s from MIT in Cognitive Science in February, 2012, and plans to go on to pursue further research in the cognitive science of language in the future. She is a recipient of both the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship. In her free time, she sings with a local choral and orchestral group, Calliope, and enjoys spending time exploring the Cambridge area with friends.

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Fall 2011
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