9.012 | Spring 2002 | Graduate

The Brain and Cognitive Sciences II

Calendar

SES # Topics

A: Foundations of Cognitive Science

1 Organizational Meeting
2 Mental representation and computation
3 Evolutionary Psychology and Behavioral Genetics
4 Evolutionary Psychology and Behavioral Genetics

B: Midlevel Vision and Attention

5 Midlevel Vision I
6 Midlevel Vision II
7 Attention
8 Recitation

C: Cognitive Neuroscience of Object Recognition

9 Basic issues, plus behavioral work in normal subjects and neuropsychological cases.
10 Physiology and Imaging
11 Faces
12 Recitation

D: Working Memory and Attention

13 Working Memory and Attention I
14 Working Memory and Attention II
15 Working Memory and Attention III
16 Recitation
17 MIDTERM EXAM

E: Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory

18 Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory I
19 Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory II
20 Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory III
21 Recitation

F: Computational Cognitive Science

22 Lecture 1: Similarity and generalization
23 Lecture 2: Learning concepts, categories, and words
24 Lecture 3: Reasoning and representativeness
25 Recitation: Causal inference and theories

G: Categorization

26 Similarity, Analogy, and Categorization
27 Words and Meanings
28 Language and Thought
29 Recitation

H: Language Acquisition

30 The Computational System of Language, Universal Grammar, Parameters and the Problem of Learnability
31 Learning and Development in Early Language. The development of finiteness, word order, agreement, case and children’s knowledge of language, universal and learned: How to understand the development of different languages
32 Variability in development, impaired language, evidence for genetic variation. Continuation of the discussion from lasts meeting, but will also consider the following
33 Recitation: How to distinguish processing from competence models of language development: The case of null-subjects in English-speaking children

I: Introduction to Language and Psycholinguistics

34 Lecture 1: Speech and speech processing (chapters 6 and 7 of Tartter, 1998)
35 Lecture 2: The structure of sentences (chapter 4 of Tartter, 1998)
36 Lecture 3: Sentence and discourse processing (Gibson & Pearlmutter, 1998, Gibson, 2000, Tanenhaus, 1995)
37 Recitation
38 Review
39 Final Exam