Please note: I will be the chair of the department starting in Fall 2018, and I will be teaching only one course a semester.
For more information on any of these courses (including prerequisites, co-requisites, etc.), please check out the official catalog. If there are discrepancies between the catalog and the information presented below, the catalog takes precedence.
PSYC 103: Introduction to Psychological Science
PSYC 103: Introduction to Psychological Science
I teach PSYC 103 as part of the Gateway to Neuroscience Learning Community--a set of linked courses for freshmen that also includes BIOL 111, BIOL 111L, and FYSS 101. As part of the LC, we focus on the neuroscientific side of psychology--neuroanatomy, psychopharmacology, neurological function, and neuroimaging--but we also devote some time to fields outside of neuroscience (such as social psychology and personality theory) that help describe and explain human behavior. This is a great first step for students interested in healthcare, biomedical science, or neuroscience more generally.
Overall, the course has several goals:
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To introduce you to the fundamentals of a range of psychological subdisciplines, including neuroscience, sensation and perception, cognition, developmental psychology, personality, social psychology, abnormal psychology, and statistics;
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To show you how psychologists discover new findings by providing you with first-hand experience with research;
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To provide you with a better understanding of the workings of your own mind!
PSYC 215: Cognitive Psychology
Cognitive psychology is the scientific investigation of the mind--the study of how we perceive the world around us, how we learn and remember, how we communicate with others, and how we think and reason. In this survey course, we'll cover a range of When do we perceive the world as it is, and when do our minds distort what we see? How reliable are our memories? How do children learn language, and how does anyone learn a foreign language? Does culture have an effect on the way we think? How do we think and reason, and what are the factors that can lead our reasoning ability to go astray?
PSYC 385: Cognitive Neuroscience
This course focuses on the use of neuroimaging techniques to explore cognition in neurotypical humans. (We will explore some clinical conditions as well, but these will not be the main topic of the course). We will go into greater depth about these techniques and their uses, and we will focus on what these techniques can teach us about the human brain and mind. We will explore a number of questions: How does the brain process information? What does “processing” mean in this context? How does the brain change in response to our experiences? How does the brain allow us to recognize objects, pay attention to a particular task, encode and retrieve memories, and make decisions? On a practical level, do people who “think different” have brains that work in different ways? Can we use neuroimaging techniques to identify future criminals, determine an unresponsive patient's level of consciousness, or distinguish truth from lies? What about the media’s coverage of cognitive neuroscience? We often hear that scientists have discovered the location of this or that cognitive process; how much of this is true, and how much is wishful thinking or misinterpretation?
PSYC 387: Neuropsychology
What does that blob of matter inside your skull actually do? How does it work? Which parts of the brain control which parts of the mind? What can we learn from people who have suffered some form of brain damage, whether from a stroke, a head injury, or a degenerative illness? Finally, what can we do for someone who cannot utter a simple sentence or remember last night’s dinner? Throughout this course, we'll examine what different kinds of brain damage can tell us about both the mind and the brain. Where relevant, we will also examine the treatments and therapies that are available to people who are struggling with these devastating conditions. We'll cover the benefits and challenges of neuropsychological testing as well as the writing and presentation styles that are common in the field.
PSYC 468: Advanced Cognitive Psychology with Lab
As you’ve worked your way through the psychology major, you’ve covered a wide range of material. You’ve learned about some of the fundamental principles of cognitive psychology (and, I hope, of other fields as well); you’ve learned the research methods that were used to discover those principles; and you’ve learned about the statistical techniques used to analyze those methods. Now, as you approach the end of the psychology major, you will have the chance to integrate all of these topics in a single lab class. In the course of the semester, we will run, analyze, and write up two experiments; the first will be one that I design, and the second will be one that you yourselves design in small groups. Therefore, we'll cover the following:
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Ethics of psychological experimentation;
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The design, implementation, revision, and analysis of psychology experiments;
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The written dissemination of your results in APA format;
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The oral presentation of those results according to the standard practices in the field.