161 - 170 of 227 results for: PSYCH

This graduate seminar will take a social-cognitive perspective on motivation and emotion. Meetings will be discussion oriented, and each meeting will focus on a different question of theoretical and applied significance. Prerequisite: 207 or consent of instructor.

Discussion of topics at the interface of natural language semantics and psychology of reasoning, such as conditionals, causal language, the language of uncertainty, generics, and syllogistic reasoning.

The course will examine the basis of numerical and mathematical abilities, and the acquisition and learning of mathematical skills, drawing on experimental and modeling studies. Topics will include numerosity, counting, basic arithmetic, and fractions, as well as algebraic and geometric reasoning as well as insight into mathematical and scientific problems. Roles of rules, procedures and symbolic, spatial, and sensory-motor representations; relationship between skill and understanding; nature of discovery and insight in mathematical reasoning; the relationship between insight and proof. Open to PhD and Masters students and to Juniors and Seniors who have completed an introductory level course in cognitive or developmental psychology.

Classic and contemporary psychological interventions; the role of psychological factors in social reforms for social problems involving healthcare, the workplace, education, intergroup, relations, and the law. Topics include theories of intervention, the role of laboratory research, evaluation, and social policy.

Do psychology and cognitive science need formal theories and/or explicit computational models? What insights should such things provide? What is the proper relationship between different theoretical and modeling approaches? Between different levels or kinds of analysis? Where do informally stated theories fit in and what are the roles of formal and computational modeling approaches in relation to other less explicitly specified forms of theorizing? This seminar will explore these issues and compare different formal and computational model variants, especially connectionist and probabilistic models, within 3-4 different target domains. Possible target domains include categorization, property induction, causal learning, perceptual decision making, language acquisition, semantics and pragmatics, and mid-level vision.

When children get older, they start to behave differently. What¿s changing? In other words, what specific mechanisms underlie different developmental correlations between age and behavioral competence. Of course, the answer (or more likely, answers plural) to this question will differ vastly from domain to domain, but are there generalizations that we can make about the ways that different factors affect behavior across domains - differences in developmental drivers for so-called ¿lower-level¿ tasks versus ¿higher-level¿ tasks, or age-related differences in the determinants of change during specific time periods? In this course, we¿ll try to get a handle on some of the extant proposals on these questions, and maybe offer some of our own.

How do we reason about other people and ourselves? Is human behavior in social situations a set of ad-hoc and irrational responses--or can we understand humans as making rational inferences under uncertainty about the people they are interacting with? This project-based seminar will re-examine classic findings from social psychology and affective science through the lens of rational analysis and probabilistic models. In collaboration with instructors, students will develop projects focused on making testable theoretical models of classic tasks and literatures with the goal of creating a publishable end product. Phenomena under consideration include but are not limited to: cognitive dissonance, attribution theory, mindset theory, stereotyping, and emotion perception.

May be repeated for credit. Prerequisite: consent of instructors. Restricted to Developmental graduate students.

Theory and research in gerontology. Normal and abnormal changes that occur in biological, cognitive, and psychological aging. Emphasis is on the environmental factors that influence the aging process. Prerequisite: graduate standing in Psychology or consent of instructor.