This is a course about how language and communication can be thought of as games. When people use language to communicate, they are following rules to perform actions that have an effect on the world, including other people. These actions might achieve goals, and they might prompt further actions, and so on. Perhaps more interestingly, these communicative actions can, over time, lead to changes in the environment and even the rules of the game itself. In other words, the playing field changes dynamically as a result of the actions performed on it.
This way of looking at language is not new, and this is also a course about how thinking about language this way can inspire (and has inspired) formal models and laboratory experiments that help us to understand how humans use language and how it evolves. In doing so we will also situate this approach to studying language in a broader context of studying the cultural evolution of complex behavioral systems more generally.

Research Practicum is a six-week half-credit course that facilitates students’ entry into research in cognitive science. Students complete a small project of their own devising, from hypothesis generation to report writing, and attend weekly guest lectures from graduate students and post-docs in cognitive science labs that are looking for undergraduate research assistants. Practicum has a ‘flipped’ classroom. Before class each week, students watch video lectures; in-person class is for asking questions about the week’s lecture, and to work on the week’s assignment for the student’s project, with help from the instructor and TA as needed. Each week, we will also have a guest lecturer from the lab of a MindCORE faculty affiliate. (The lecture and the project time could be joined into a single class session (~2.5-3 hours long) but it may be preferable to split these into two separate class sessions in the week.) The main product – pieces of which the student submits every week – is a 4-5 page paper reporting the study they conducted. Each week, students will also write a 150 word summary/reflection on the guest lecture that week.

This is a course on how language relates to other cognitive systems. We will discuss the question of whether and how the language one speaks affects the way one thinks, the relation between words and concepts, the link between language acquisition and conceptual development in children, and the potential role of language in shaping uniquely human concepts. The course incorporates cross-linguistic, cross-cultural and developmental perspectives and combines readings from linguistics, psychology, philosophy, neuroscience and other fields within cognitive science.

The purpose of this course is to introduce students to the basic concepts of sentence structure in a "pretheoretical" framework, demonstrating that any natural human language must have certain structures and must choose the rest from a restricted universal set. The textbook, which was written for this course, discusses each set of structures with examples from six languages: English, Spanish, Latin, Biblical Hebrew, Mandarin, and Navajo. The instructor will add languages from among those with which the students are familiar, within the limits of his competence. This course will help students not only to learn foreign languages, but also to improve their own writing skills, by making the structures that they must use more explicit and intelligible.

How do minds work? This course surveys a wide range of answers to this question from disciplines ranging from philosophy to neuroscience. The course devotes special attention to the use of simple computational and mathematical models. Topics include perception, learning, memory, decision making, emotion and consciousness. The course shows how the different views from the parent disciplines interact and identifies some common themes among the theories that have been proposed. The course pays particular attention to the distinctive role of computation in such theories and provides an introduction to some of the main directions of current research in the field. It is a requirement for the BA in Cognitive Science, the BAS in Computer and Cognitive Science, and the minor in Cognitive Science, and it is recommended for students taking the dual degree in Computer and Cognitive Science.

How do minds work? This course surveys a wide range of answers to this question from disciplines ranging from philosophy to neuroscience. The course devotes special attention to the use of simple computational and mathematical models. Topics include perception, learning, memory, decision making, emotion and consciousness. The course shows how the different views from the parent disciplines interact and identifies some common themes among the theories that have been proposed. The course pays particular attention to the distinctive role of computation in such theories and provides an introduction to some of the main directions of current research in the field. It is a requirement for the BA in Cognitive Science, the BAS in Computer and Cognitive Science, and the minor in Cognitive Science, and it is recommended for students taking the dual degree in Computer and Cognitive Science.

How do minds work? This course surveys a wide range of answers to this question from disciplines ranging from philosophy to neuroscience. The course devotes special attention to the use of simple computational and mathematical models. Topics include perception, learning, memory, decision making, emotion and consciousness. The course shows how the different views from the parent disciplines interact and identifies some common themes among the theories that have been proposed. The course pays particular attention to the distinctive role of computation in such theories and provides an introduction to some of the main directions of current research in the field. It is a requirement for the BA in Cognitive Science, the BAS in Computer and Cognitive Science, and the minor in Cognitive Science, and it is recommended for students taking the dual degree in Computer and Cognitive Science.

How do minds work? This course surveys a wide range of answers to this question from disciplines ranging from philosophy to neuroscience. The course devotes special attention to the use of simple computational and mathematical models. Topics include perception, learning, memory, decision making, emotion and consciousness. The course shows how the different views from the parent disciplines interact and identifies some common themes among the theories that have been proposed. The course pays particular attention to the distinctive role of computation in such theories and provides an introduction to some of the main directions of current research in the field. It is a requirement for the BA in Cognitive Science, the BAS in Computer and Cognitive Science, and the minor in Cognitive Science, and it is recommended for students taking the dual degree in Computer and Cognitive Science.

How do minds work? This course surveys a wide range of answers to this question from disciplines ranging from philosophy to neuroscience. The course devotes special attention to the use of simple computational and mathematical models. Topics include perception, learning, memory, decision making, emotion and consciousness. The course shows how the different views from the parent disciplines interact and identifies some common themes among the theories that have been proposed. The course pays particular attention to the distinctive role of computation in such theories and provides an introduction to some of the main directions of current research in the field. It is a requirement for the BA in Cognitive Science, the BAS in Computer and Cognitive Science, and the minor in Cognitive Science, and it is recommended for students taking the dual degree in Computer and Cognitive Science.

How do minds work? This course surveys a wide range of answers to this question from disciplines ranging from philosophy to neuroscience. The course devotes special attention to the use of simple computational and mathematical models. Topics include perception, learning, memory, decision making, emotion and consciousness. The course shows how the different views from the parent disciplines interact and identifies some common themes among the theories that have been proposed. The course pays particular attention to the distinctive role of computation in such theories and provides an introduction to some of the main directions of current research in the field. It is a requirement for the BA in Cognitive Science, the BAS in Computer and Cognitive Science, and the minor in Cognitive Science, and it is recommended for students taking the dual degree in Computer and Cognitive Science.