ENROLL

Stephanie Cox

First-year students interested in this program should enroll in this seminar. The course is recommended but not required for the minor and it will count as one of the electives. From cradle to grave, cultural assumptions shape our own sense of who we are. This course is designed to enable American and international students to compare how their own and other societies view birth, infancy, adolescence, marriage, adulthood, and old age. Using children's books, child-rearing manuals, movies, and ethnographies, we will explore some of the assumptions in different parts of the globe about what it means to "grow up."

Held for new first year students

Jason Decker

An interdisciplinary examination of issues concerning the mind and mental phenomena. The course will draw on work from diverse fields such as artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, philosophy, linguistics, anthropology, and neuroscience. Topics to be discussed include: the mind-body problem, embodied cognition, perception, representation, reasoning, and learning.

Kathleen Galotti

Prerequisite: Psychology 110 or instructor permission

Julie Neiworth

It should be obvious that every process that goes on in the mind has physiological underpinnings. But, whether we can unlock the secrets of learning, memory, perception, language, decision-making, emotional responding, empathy, morality, social thinking, deception, and manipulation as they are supported by neurons and neural connections is a longstanding and elusive problem in psychology. Contemporary primary source articles are mostly used for this discussion-driven course, but a brief textbook/manual on brain processing is also required. The student should leave the class with a working understanding of brain processes and of contemporary theories of brain processes that may support many mental processes in humans.

Prerequisite: Psychology 110 or Biology 125 or Psychology 216 or Neuroscience 127 or permission of the instructor.