Time and Location

Spring 2024: Tuesdays, 12:50pm – 3:50pm, Normal Hall 1001

Description and Goals

This version of “Behavioral & Cognitive Neursocience 1” (and 2) places special emphasis on the field of cognitive neuroscience.  What is cognitive neuroscience?  Cognition is a general term that we use to describe mental processes related to knowledge acquision, and encompasses topics such as attention, perception, memory, language, emotion, decision-making, and many others. Neuroscience is a field which focuses on understanding the structure and function of the nervous system and the brain. Thus, cognitive neuroscience aims to understand how coordinated brain activity gives rise to different aspects of cognition. In order to become an effective cognitive neuroscientist, you need to master the foundations of the field and have technical expertise to conduct independent research. To that end, in this course we will not only cover foundational topics in cog neuro, but also learn how to code together in Python! By the end of the course, my goal is for you to have a firm grasp on seminal topics and methods in the field, as well as increased technical skills to enhance your capacity for conducting scientific research.

Over the course of this semester, students will:

• Understand experimental findings on topics such as hemispheric specialization, attention, memory, cognitive control, social cognition, and others
• Develop a capacity to code in Python, cultivating general coding skills that can be applied to other programming languages
• Acquire an understanding of research methods in cognitive neuroscience and the ability to critically evaluate published research