Courses:

Each module of the course involves a series of overview lectures by a leading researcher in the field, complemented by recitation opportunities on primary research papers for students. By offering a thorough introduction to the current status of the discipline while emphasizing critical thinking, 9.012 aims to prepare students for an exciting and rapid beginning to their contributions as cognitive scientists.

Prerequisites: 9.011, The Brain and Cognitive Sciences I

Course Requirements

Midterm exam
Final exam
Two class presentations, based on the topics listed below.

Foundations of Cognitive Science

Papers for presentation and discussion:

Daly, M. & Wilson, M. 1999. The truth about Cinderella. Yale University Press.

Klein, et al. 2000. "Transient Activity in the Human Calcatrine Cortex During Visual Mental Imagery: An event-Related fMRI Study." J Cog Neuroscience, 12, 15-23.

Bouchard, T. J., Jr. 1994. "Genes, environment, personality." Science, 264, 1700-1701.

Computational Vision

Papers for presentation and discussion:

Sinha, P. and Poggio, T. (2000) High-level learning of early perceptual tasks. Perceptual Learning, Ed. Manfred Fahle, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. (In press)

Williams, SM, McCoy AN, Purves D (1998) "An empirical explanation of brightness." Proc Natl Acad Sci 95: 13301-13306.

Lotto, RB, Purves D (1999) "The effects of color on brightness." Nature Neurosci 2: 1010-1014.

Purves D, Lotto R B, Williams SM, Nundy S, and Yang, Z (2000) "Why we see things the way we do: Evidence for a wholly empirical strategy of vision." Philos. Trans. Roy. Soc (In press).

Cognitive Neuroscience of Object Recognition

Papers for presentation and discussion:

Moscovitch, M., Winocur, G., Behrmann, M. (1997). "What is special about face recognition? Nineteen experiments on a person with visual object agnosia and dyslexia but normal face recognition." Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 9, 555-604.

Logothetis, N.K.; Pauls, J. (1995). "Psychophysical and physiological evidence for viewer-centered object representations in the primate." Cereb Cortex 5, 270-88.

Ullman, S. & Soloviev, S. (1999). "Computation of pattern invariance in brain-like structures." Neural Networks 12, 1021-1036.

Grill-Spector, K; Kushnir, T; Edelman, S; Avidan, G; Itzchak, Y.; and Malach, R. (1999). "Differential Processing of Objects under Various Viewing Conditions in the Human Lateral Occipital Complex." Neuron, 24 (1) 187-203.

Information Processing and Capacity Limits

Papers for presentation and discussion:

Sternberg, S. (1969). The discovery of processing stages: Extensions of Donders' method. In W. G. Koster (Ed.) Attention and Performance II (pp. 276-315). Amsterdam: Elsevier.

Treisman, A. (1993). The perception of features and objects. In A. Baddeley & L. Weiskrantz (Eds.), Attention: Selection, awareness, and control (pp. 5-35). Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Potter, M.C. (1975). "Meaning in visual search." Science, 187, 965-966.

Kanwisher, N, & Wojciulik, E. (2000). "Visual attention: Insights from brain imaging." Nature Reviews: Neuroscience, 1, 91-100.

Working Memory & Attention  

Papers for presentation and discussion:

Rainer G, Rao SC, Miller EK (1999). "Prospective coding for objects in the primate prefrontal cortex." Journal of Neuroscience 19, 5493-5505.

Tomita H, Ohbayashi M, Nakahara K, Hasegawa I, Miyashita Y (1999). "Top-down signal from prefrontal cortex in executive control of memory retrieval." Nature 401 (6754), 699-703. 

Eldridge LL, Knowlton BJ, Furmanski CS, Bookheimer SY, Engel SA (2000). "Remembering episodes: a selective role for the hippocampus during retrieval." Nature Neuroscience, 3, 1149-1152.

Kirchhoff BA, Wagner AD, Maril A, Stern CE (2000). "Prefrontal-temporal circuitry for episodic encoding and subsequent memory." Journal of Neuroscience, 20, 6173-6180.

Wagner AD, Maril A, Schacter DL (2000). "Interactions between forms of memory: When priming hinders new learning." Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 12:S2, 52-60

Similarity, Analogy, Categorization, Language, and Thought

Papers for presentation and discussion:

Landauer, T. K., and S.T. Dumais. "A solution to Plato's problem: The Latent Semantic Analysis theory of the acquisition, induction, and representation of knowledge." In Psychological Review 104, (1997): 211-240.

Ramscar, M.J.A. "Wittgenstein and the representation of psychological categories." In Similarity andcategorisation: SimCat 97, Dept of Artificial Intelligence, University of Edinburgh. 1997, 205-11.

How to Distinguish Processing from Competence Models of Language Development

Papers for presentation and discussion:

Hyams, Nina and Wexler, Ken. 1993. "On the Grammatical Basis of Null Subjects in Child Language." Linguistic Inquiry, vol. 24 (3), 421-459.

Bloom, Paul. 1990. "Subjectless Sentences in Child Language." Linguistic Inquiry, vol. 21 (4), 491-504.