Cognitive Neuroscience
    • The central question to be addressed is: How does brain enable mind and behavior? Cognitive neuroscience is an emerging interdisciplinary field in which psychological, physiological, and computational methodologies are brought to bear in understanding the neural basis of cognitive processes.  In this course, we will consider the application of methodologies such as physiological recordings from neurons in awake, behaving animals, functional neuroimaging  (EEG and fMRI) of normal subjects performing cognitive tasks, behavioral studies of brain-injured patients with selective cognitive deficits, and computational modeling of normal and impaired processing, in understanding cognitive domains such as high-level vision and attention, learning and memory, reading and language, meaning and semantics, and the organization and control of action. In each instance, the emphasis will be on how the application of converging methodologies, particularly those related to brain organization and function, leads to important insights into the nature of cognitive processes that would be difficult to obtain through any one conventional methodology alone.


Neuroimaging Seminar
  • This seminar will examine how the brain enables higher level cognitive processes, such as perception, memory, problem solving, language comprehension, visual thinking, etc. The class will examine what recent brain imaging studies can tell us about these various cognitive processes. This new scientific approach has the potential of providing important information about how the brain thinks, indicating not only what parts of the brain perform what function, but also how the activities of different parts of the brain are organized to jointly enable cognition, and how various neurological diseases (e.g. aphasia, neglect) affect brain activity. This course will be offered as a seminar format covering selected topics in neuroimaging methods, and cognitive function related to brain activity. Part of the course will be ‘lab-based’ dedicated to hands-on learning of neuroimaging data acquisition and analysis.


Honors Seminar
  • The exact topic of this seminar varies from semester to semester. Regardless of the topic, the class is designed to examine what the current state of knowledge is, as gathered from multiple scientific perspectives: perceptual psychology, neuropsychology, and neuroscience. As we tackle different topics, we will discuss and evaluate different techniques of scientific inquiry. How is progress made in science? What kinds of experiments are the most effective? How has the development of new neuroimaging techniques (fMRI, for example) shaped the field? The course includes a 'lab-based' component dedicated to hands-on learning of neuroimaging data acquisition and analysis.