Introduction to Cognitive Science

Professor Polk takes you on a quick tour of the anatomy of the brain. In addition to examining important structures and where they're located inside the brain, you'll also learn about their function. You'll see firsthand where vision happens; how information is communicated between the hemispheres; and the brain regions involved in sleep, motor control, and memory.

Explore the fascinating cognitive process of human language, one of our most powerful tools. Discover some of the key features of natural languages and how we acquire them. You might be surprised to learn that one of the most significant aspects of language that we use every single day is ... guessing.

Meet French patient Louis Victor Leborgne and his physician Paul Broca. Learn how Broca's work set the foundation for understanding that an injury in one brain region does not necessarily undermine cognitive function in other areas. Although the neurobiology of human languages is not yet fully understood, explore the dual stream model of language processing.

Artificial neural networks play a central role in cognitive science. Learn how these networks simulate the excitatory and inhibitory processing of real neurons, and how scientists train the networks using sophisticated learning algorithms. This type of modeling provides the foundation for the development of ChatGPT and other AI applications.

Learn about the violation-of-expectation paradigm that allows researchers to study infant cognition with often surprising results. From physical to psychological to moral reasoning, scientists have determined that babies and very young children understand much more about the world than we had previously realized.

Participate with Professor Polk in fascinating experiments that reveal many aspects of your working memory-your ability to store information for a brief period for a particular purpose. Learn about the several working memory systems you use every day and discover how cognitive scientists think working memory might be implemented in the human brain.

How is it that we can remember so much information for so long, but we also make so many mistakes in what we remember? Explore the psychology, neuroscience, and computational modeling of episodic memory-long-term memory for personal episodes from your own life. Discover how and why this information gets distorted over time in subtle ways we don't notice.

We each maintain an enormous database of information we've learned over the course of our lives, our semantic memory. Learn about the latest cognitive science models in which semantic memory is organized by modality, with some regions of the brain representing perceptual features and others representing functional features.

If an animal can learn specific hand signals and communicate with a trainer, does that mean he has language? If a great ape can recognize itself in a mirror, does it have the consciousness we attribute to humans? Learn about some exciting animal experiments and the resulting evidence. Cognitive scientists have arrived at some conclusions that you might find contrary to your personal experience.