9.012 | Spring 2002 | Graduate

The Brain and Cognitive Sciences II

Course Description

This course is the second half of the intensive survey of brain and behavioral studies for first-year graduate students in the Brain and Cognitive Sciences curriculum. Each module of this core course involves a series of overview lectures by leading researchers in the field. By offering a thorough introduction to the …

This course is the second half of the intensive survey of brain and behavioral studies for first-year graduate students in the Brain and Cognitive Sciences curriculum. Each module of this core course involves a series of overview lectures by leading researchers in the field. By offering a thorough introduction to the current state of the discipline while emphasizing critical thinking, the course aims to prepare students as cognitive scientists.

Topics include: perception, attention, working memory, recognition and recall, language, and other issues in cognitive science. Topics are covered from the neural, behavioral and computational perspectives.

Five images illustrating the main concepts of this course: face recognition, sentence tree, photographs of twins, Rodin's The Thinker, and human fMRI brain scan.
Image 1: Face recognition. (Image by Prof. Pawan Sinha.); Image 2: Photographs of twins. (Image by Prof. Steven Pinker.); Image 3: Sentence tree. (Image by Prof. Edward Gibson.); Image 4: Rodin’s The Thinker. (Image by Prof. Lera Boroditsky.); Image 5. Midsaggital fMRI human brain scan. (Image courtesy of MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.)