Cognitive and Brain Science

Images wavered in the sunlit trim of appliances, something always moving, a brightness flying, so much to know in the world. —Don Delillo, Libra

A few cartoons lead to cataclysmic events in Europe. A man’s statement that he “can’t breathe” ricochets across North America. A photograph printed in a newspaper moves a solitary reader. A snapshot posted on the Internet leads to dreams of fanciful places. Memories of a past year haunt us like ghosts. What each of these occurrences has in common is that they all entail the force of images in our lives, whether these images are visual, acoustic, or tactile in nature; made by hand or machine; circulated by word of mouth; or simply imagined. In this seminar, we will consider the role that images play in the lives of people in various settings throughout the world. In delving into terrains at once actual and virtual, we will develop an understanding of how people throughout the world create, use, circulate, and perceive images—and how such efforts tie into ideas and practices of sensory perception, time, memory, affect, imagination, sociality, history, politics, and personal and collective imaginings. Through these engagements, we will reflect on the fundamental human need for images, the complicated politics and ethics of images, aesthetic and cultural sensibilities, dynamics of time and memory, the intricate play between the actual and the imagined, and the circulation of digital images in an age of globalization and social media. We will also consider the spectral, haunting qualities of many imaginal moments in life. Readings are to include a number of writings in anthropology, art history, philosophy, psychology, cultural studies, and critical theory. Images are to be drawn from photographs, films and videos, paintings, sculptures, drawings, street art and graffiti, religion, rituals, tattoos, inscriptions, novels, poems, road signs, advertisements, dreams, fantasies, and any number of fabulations in the worlds in which we live and imagine. The seminar will be held during two class sessions each week during the fall and spring terms. Along with that, students will meet individually with the instructor every other week through the course of each semester to discuss their ongoing academic and creative work. In the fall semester, we will all also meet every other week in an informal group setting to watch films together, discuss student research and writing projects, and engage creatively with images and imaginal thought.

How does a chronic illness affect a person’s orientation to the everyday? What are the social and political forces that underpin life in a homeless shelter? What is the experiential world of a blind person, a musician, a refugee, or a child at play? In an effort to answer these and like-minded questions, anthropologists have become increasingly interested in developing phenomenological accounts of particular lived realities in order to understand—and convey to others—the nuances and underpinnings of such realities in terms that more general social or symbolic analyses cannot achieve. In this context, phenomenology offers an analytic method that works to understand and describe in words phenomena as they appear to the consciousnesses of certain peoples. The phenomena most often in question for anthropologists include the workings of time, perception, selfhood, language, bodies, suffering, and morality as they take form in particular lives within the context of any number of social, linguistic, and political forces. In this course, we will explore phenomenological approaches in anthropology by reading and discussing some of the most significant efforts along these lines. Each student will also try their hand at developing a phenomenological account of a specific social or subjective reality through a combination of ethnographic research, participant observation, and ethnographic writing.

The human brain contains roughly 80 billion neurons connected by trillions of synapses. This uniquely complex organ is responsible for our remarkable capabilities, including the sensation and perception of diverse internal and external stimuli; the performance of precise movements and behaviors; and the ability to learn and remember an extraordinary amount of information. In this lecture course, we will investigate the nervous system from molecular, cellular, and systems-level perspectives. We will delve into the structure and function of neurons, including the molecular mechanisms underlying the action potential and synaptic transmission. We will learn how sensory systems detect diverse external and internal stimuli and how they communicate this information to the brain. We will also explore how the brain drives motor output, from the motor cortex to the neuromuscular junction, and the areas of the brain that control distinct aspects of language. Students will regularly engage in active learning through in-class, small-group exercises that complement content covered in lectures. In group conference, we will learn about neurodivergence and neurological disorders through discussions centered on the book, The Disordered Mind: What Unusual Brains Tell Us about Ourselves, by Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel. Students should leave this course with a solid understanding of the principles of neuroscience, which will prepare them for further study in neuroscience, physiology, and medicine.

The formation of an individual’s life is dependent upon a complex mix of cultural experiences, social interactions, and personal health and physiology. At the center of this intricate web is the biological component unique to each of us, yet shared in some form by all life on earth—our genes. Genes contribute much to what makes each of us an individual, from hair color and body shape to intelligence and personality. In this course, we will attempt to gain an understanding of how genes and chromosomes provide the basic blueprint that leads to these unique physical and behavioral characteristics. In doing so, we will discuss the central concepts of human genetics, including: the mechanisms and patterns of inheritance, sex-linked traits, the genetics of behavior, how genes encode information in the form of DNA, the role of mutations in causing disease, human origins and evolution, and the application of various genetic technologies such as gene therapy and genetically modified organisms. Readings will be drawn from texts as well as current popular-press and peer-reviewed articles. No previous background in biology is required, other than a curiosity and desire to understand the genetic mechanisms that shape human existence and make us who we are.

Biology, the study of life on Earth, encompasses structures and forms ranging from the very minute to the very large. In order to grasp the complexities of life, we begin this study with the cellular and molecular forms and mechanisms that serve as the foundation for all living organisms. The initial part of the semester will introduce the fundamental molecules critical to the biochemistry of life processes. From there, we branch out to investigate the major ideas, structures, and concepts central to the biology of cells, genetics, and the chromosomal basis of inheritance. Finally, we conclude the semester by examining how those principles relate to the mechanisms of evolution. Throughout the semester, we will discuss the individuals responsible for major discoveries, as well as the experimental techniques and process by which such advances in biological understanding are made. Classes will be supplemented with weekly laboratory work.

Disorders of the brain are often devastating. They can disrupt fundamental characteristics of life, such as memory formation and retrieval, the ability to communicate, the foundations of a personality, and the execution of movements, including those necessary for breathing. In this course, we will learn about the brain in health and disease by exploring the neuroscience of neurological disorders. We will study Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s disease, lytico-bodig, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, chronic traumatic encephalopathy, and autism spectrum disorder. We will consider these disorders holistically and from a biological point of view. We will explore: the lived experience of the affected and their loved ones; how symptoms of the disorders can be understood by studying changes in the neural tissues, cells, and molecules associated with each disorder; and what is known about genetic or environmental underpinnings and current treatments. Readings will be drawn primarily from the writings of the neurologist Oliver Sacks, the neuroscientist Eric Kandel, and the science journalist and Parkinson’s patient Jon Palfreman, in addition to magazine articles, scientific studies, and relevant films that complement and expand upon their descriptions of brain function.

This lecture course is a rigorous introduction to computer science and the art of computer programming using the elegant, eminently practical, yet easy-to-learn programming language Python. We will learn the principles of problem-solving with a computer while also gaining the programming skills necessary for further study in the discipline. We will emphasize the power of abstraction and the benefits of clearly written, well-structured programs, beginning with imperative programming and working our way up to object-oriented concepts such as classes, methods, and inheritance. Along the way, we will explore the fundamental idea of an algorithm; how computers represent and manipulate numbers, text, and other data (such as images and sound) in binary; Boolean logic; conditional, iterative, and recursive programming; functional abstraction; file processing; and basic data structures such as lists and dictionaries. We will also learn introductory computer graphics, how to process simple user interactions via mouse and keyboard, and some principles of game design and implementation. All students will complete a final programming project of their own design. Weekly hands-on laboratory sessions will reinforce the concepts covered in class through extensive practice at the computer.

This course is a rigorous introduction to digital communication networks from a liberal-arts perspective. The main question that we will address is how information of all kinds can be transmitted efficiently, between two points at a distance, in such a way that very little assumption need be made about the physical mode of transport and how the route the information travels need not be known in advance. We emphasize the importance of abstraction and the use of redundancy to establish error-free transmission even in the face of significant noise. We study protocol stacks from the application layer (canonical example: web browser) down to the physical transmission medium. We analyze how high-level information (for instance, a message including an image attachment being sent via email) is translated to bits, broken into discrete packets, sent independently using the basic building blocks of the Internet—and then how those packets are reassembled, seemingly instantaneously, in the correct order. We will attempt to demystify the alphabet soup of networking terminology, including TCP/IP, HTTP, HTTPS, VPN, NFC, WiFi, Bluetooth, and 5G. We will consider major shifts in technology that have transformed communication networks from the telegraph to the telephone to radio, from copper wire to fiberoptics and satellite, and the ubiquity of cellular networks. We also will consider the close relationship between the open-source movement and the rise of the Internet and web.

This is an introduction to computer programming through the lens of old-school, arcade-style video games such as Pong, Adventure, Breakout, Pac-Man, Space Invaders, and Tetris. We will learn programming from the ground up and demonstrate how it can be used as a general-purpose, problem-solving tool. Throughout the course, we will emphasize the power of abstraction and the benefits of clearly written, well-structured code. We will cover variables, conditionals, iteration, functions, lists, and objects. We will focus on event-driven programming and interactive game loops. We will consider when it makes sense to build software from scratch and when it might be more prudent to make use of existing libraries and frameworks rather than reinventing the wheel. We will also discuss some of the early history of video games and their lasting cultural importance. Students will design and implement their own low-res, but fun-to-play, games. No prior experience with programming or web design is necessary (nor expected nor even desirable).

In this course, we will study a variety of data structures and algorithms that are important for the design of sophisticated computer programs, along with techniques for managing program complexity. Throughout the course, we will use Java, a strongly typed, object-oriented programming language. Topics covered will include types and polymorphism, arrays, linked lists, stacks, queues, priority queues, heaps, dictionaries, balanced trees, and graphs, as well as several important algorithms for manipulating those structures. We will also study techniques for analyzing the efficiency of algorithms. The central theme tying all of these topics together is the idea of abstraction and the related notions of information hiding and encapsulation, which we will emphasize throughout the course. Weekly lab sessions will reinforce the concepts covered in class through extensive hands-on practice at the computer.

Variance, correlation coefficient, regression analysis, statistical significance, and margin of error—you’ve heard these terms and other statistical phrases bantered about before, and you’ve seen them interspersed in news reports and research articles. But what do they mean? How are they used? And why are they so important? Serving as an introduction to the concepts, techniques, and reasoning central to the understanding of data, this lecture course focuses on the fundamental methods of statistical analysis used to gain insight into diverse areas of human interest. The use, misuse, and abuse of statistics will be the central focus of the course; and specific topics of exploration will be drawn from experimental design theory, sampling theory, data analysis, and statistical inference. Applications will be considered in current events, business, psychology, politics, medicine, and many other areas of the natural and social sciences. Statistical (spreadsheet) software will be introduced and used extensively in this course, but no prior experience with the technology is assumed. Group conferences, conducted in workshop mode, will serve to reinforce student understanding of the course material. This lecture is recommended for anybody wishing to be a better-informed consumer of data and strongly recommended for those planning to pursue advanced undergraduate or graduate research in the natural sciences or social sciences. Enrolled students are expected to have an understanding of basic high-school algebra and plane coordinate geometry.

Many of us are struck by the growing irrationality of contemporary democratic politics to the point where we despair of our capacity to address problems like global climate change or pandemics that could pose existential threats to our species, to fashion constructive foreign policy as wars rage, or to face a whole range of urgent but more mundane policy issues. In this class, we will seek to understand disturbing trends like populism, polarization, disinformation, and self-injuring or -defeating politics, as well as the resurfacing of nativism, xenophobia, and racism in contemporary politics—in part on their own terms but also by asking whether they are deeply rooted in human nature, at least on our current best understandings of ourselves. More specifically, democracy seems to rely on at least a minimum degree of rationality, learning, openness to argument and difference, and self-control on the part of the citizens whose votes and opinions guide government policy. But is this reliance foolhardy in light of what recent history, psychology, evolutionary theory, philosophy, and cognitive science teach? Do aspects of our current social and technological circumstances make us less able to manifest these qualities of character today than our Enlightenment progenitors hoped in the era of democratic revolutions—the era from which many of the ideas and institutions that continue to inform our politics today emerged? In this course, we will survey aspects of the political history of recent centuries, as well as our own historical moment, to ask if they should temper confidence in the power of reason in politics. We will also examine recent research in cognitive science, psychology, and philosophy that conclude that it is hard to sustain a model of human behavior that places reason and rationality in the driver’s seat. What alternative accounts of human nature are emerging from recent research? And what are their political implications, especially for democratic societies? By bringing together political science, history, and theory with cognitive science, psychology, and philosophy, we should be able to occupy the intersection of distinct but equally relevant disciplines to ask whether the Enlightenment’s faith in democracy was misplaced. Or, instead, are there reasons to believe that democracy can maintain its claim to legitimacy, even after reason has been demoted in our understandings of human nature? To address this final question, we will also examine proposals for 21st-century democratic reforms that either seek to adjust downward the expectations on the capacity of citizens to engage in deliberative politics or to refashion political institutions to better summon the better angels of our nature.

Many of us are struck by the growing irrationality of contemporary democratic politics to the point where we despair of our capacity to address problems like global climate change or pandemics that could pose existential threats to our species, to fashion constructive foreign policy as wars rage, or to face a whole range of urgent but more mundane policy issues. In this class, we will seek to understand disturbing trends like populism, polarization, disinformation, and self-injuring or -defeating politics, as well as the resurfacing of nativism, xenophobia, and racism in contemporary politics—in part on their own terms but also by asking whether they are deeply rooted in human nature, at least on our current best understandings of ourselves. More specifically, democracy seems to rely on at least a minimum degree of rationality, learning, openness to argument and difference, and self-control on the part of the citizens whose votes and opinions guide government policy. But is this reliance foolhardy in light of what recent history, psychology, evolutionary theory, philosophy, and cognitive science teach? Do aspects of our current social and technological circumstances make us less able to manifest these qualities of character today than our Enlightenment progenitors hoped in the era of democratic revolutions—the era from which many of the ideas and institutions that continue to inform our politics today emerged? In this course, we will survey aspects of the political history of recent centuries, as well as our own historical moment, to ask if they should temper confidence in the power of reason in politics. We will also examine recent research in cognitive science, psychology, and philosophy that conclude that it is hard to sustain a model of human behavior that places reason and rationality in the driver’s seat. What alternative accounts of human nature are emerging from recent research? And what are their political implications, especially for democratic societies? By bringing together political science, history, and theory with cognitive science, psychology, and philosophy, we should be able to occupy the intersection of distinct but equally relevant disciplines to ask whether the Enlightenment’s faith in democracy was misplaced. Or, instead, are there reasons to believe that democracy can maintain its claim to legitimacy, even after reason has been demoted in our understandings of human nature? To address this final question, we will also examine proposals for 21st-century democratic reforms that either seek to adjust downward the expectations on the capacity of citizens to engage in deliberative politics or to refashion political institutions to better summon the better angels of our nature.

The amount you've learned by the time you start college is astonishing. You can recognize thousands of faces, understand tens of thousands of words, and expertly navigate your environments. The flexibility of human learning is unique, even when compared to artificial intelligence. And yet, few of us have any more than an informal understanding of how this works. How and when should we study? Why can we recall lyrics from entire albums but forget every word of a foreign language that we learned at school? How do narratives, culture, and context support and shape learning? These kinds of questions have driven researchers to design countless experiments all over the world—even entering the ocean to measure underwater memories formed by scuba divers. In biweekly group collaboratives with the instructor, we will use lab activities, field trips, and film screenings to explore how different environments support memory and learning at all ages, including behavioral experiments, preschools, “memory athlete” competitions, and care centers for older individuals experiencing memory loss. We will ask how learning works according to psychology, education, linguistics, neuroscience, and cognitive development. We’ll consider the racial, ethnic, and neurodiverse contexts in which learning occurs and the meanings and motivations behind progressive and alternative education. In each field we encounter, we will often start with the same central questions: What is the evidence for each claim about how learning works? And, can we—and should we—use these insights in our own lives? Individual conference work with the instructor will begin with the second question: Students will apply theories or methods from learning science in an appropriate area of their life and evaluate the outcomes—developing critiques of existing approaches, as well as their own proposals, along the way.

Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it. —Baruch Spinoza, Ethics

What should I wear today? How should I respond to this text? Where should I apply to college? Every decision we make, big or small, is influenced by our emotions—at times without our explicit knowledge or conscious awareness of their influence. We can certainly appreciate how this might be the case in our own lived experiences, from the joys of picking a fun outfit to the anxiety of making a life-changing decision. Up until recently, however, the fields of psychology, economics, and neuroscience paid little attention to—and, in some cases, outright rejected—the empirical (evidence-based) study of how emotions affect our decisions. In this FYS seminar, we will explore the essential role that emotions play in our lives and their strong interplay with our decisions. During the fall semester, we will read and analyze works in psychology, behavioral economics, literature, philosophy, and popular media to examine how scholars in psychology and other disciplines have attempted to define and study something as subjective as emotions. Examples include works by William James, Paul Ekman, Lisa Feldman-Barrett, Daniel Kahneman, and others. We will also explore the role of emotions as the decision-making process unfolds. We will embed those processes in a variety of contexts, including personal, social, forensic, financial, and political realms. In the spring, we will revisit and build on these concepts by pinpointing the areas of the brain that are involved in generating, expressing, and regulating emotions and making decisions. No prior knowledge of psychology or neuroscience is required. This course may appeal to students who are curious about the mind and brain, as well as to those who wish to deepen their storytelling and character development in creative writing and filmmaking. Students will meet in biweekly conferences with the instructor to develop independent projects and biweekly small-group collaboratives with their peers to engage in creative group activities, applied workshops, book/journal clubs, film screenings, guest lectures, hands-on labs, and field trips.

Why is linguistic communication so important to us? Do other primates have language? How do humans understand messages from one another despite uncertainty, distraction, and ever-changing environments? In this course, we will consider central questions about language: Are we the only ones who have it? When did we learn it? What does artificial intelligence (AI) like ChatGPT actually learn? And what exactly is the point of so-called “small talk”? In this course, we will start with an introduction to comparative research with animals, allowing us to consider other forms of communication. Next, we’ll turn to our own species, examining what findings from studies with babies and children can tell us about the nature and goals of communication. Finally, we’ll confront the artificial elephant in the room: neural networks. What kind of language have they learned, and how can we study it? In class, we will discuss the advances and consequences of AI. Students should come prepared to engage with the topic of communication from multiple perspectives. Through small-group conferences each week, students will develop projects that relate the course to their collective interests, such as learning and communicating in Toki Pona (a philosophical artistic-constructed language), researching the limits of AI language models, observing and analyzing children’s communication, or designing a behavioral intervention study that implements different communication practices for their peers.

This course analyzes children’s media, specifically preschool media through middle school, using cognitive and developmental psychology theory and methods. We will examine specific educational television programs with regard to cognitive and social developmental issues related to family life, peer relationships, and education issues. Because media has an enormous impact on children’s behavior, this has increasingly become a subject of interest among researchers and the public. This course addresses that interest by applying cognitive and developmental psychological research and theories for the development and production of educational media. In addition, the course helps identify essential elements that determine the positive and negative qualities of media for children. Finally, the course examines and evaluates how psychological theories and frameworks can guide the successful production of children’s media (e.g., social cognitive theory). Projects and assignments will include weekly class discussions on peer-reviewed journal articles, watching television programs, group preschool television pitchbook preparation, child observations interacting with screens, and media artifact critiques as assigned.

We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can and guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous to us, as we should guard against the plague. —William James, 1887, Habit

We all want happy lives filled with meaning and satisfaction. Yet, for many of us, happiness can be difficult to obtain with regularity or to sustain over a long period of time. Happiness is more than a feeling; rather, it is a state of well-being that should last a lifetime. Like exercising to improve physical health, it takes sustained cognitive effort to improve our mental health and engage in practices to promote well-being. We can look to evidence from the fields of psychology and neuroscience that tells us that we are mentally unprepared to: (1) predict what will make us happy, and (2) engage in behaviors that are known to make us happier. In this course, we will cover the psychological and brain-based factors for why happiness feels so fleeting and what we can do to build better and more effective habits that have been shown to lead to longer-term maintenance of a positive mood and well-being. Students will read foundational work in the field of positive psychology by Martin Seligman, Sonja Lyubomirsky, Edward Diener, Daniel Kahneman, and others. We will also discuss studies in neuroscience that show how behavioral interventions in positive psychology can impact the brain’s structure and function—just like building stronger muscles during exercise. Through small-group conferences, students will apply evidence-based practices, such as bringing order and organization to their daily lives, expressing gratitude, and building social bonds (i.e., “cross training” for the mind) in activities called “Rewirements.” For the final project, called “Unlearning Yourself,” students will learn to undo or replace a detrimental habit (e.g., overspending, social-media use, poor sleep hygiene, complaining, procrastinating) by establishing a plan to cultivate evidence-based practices for sustained well-being. By the end of this course, students will have gained the ability to sift through the ever-booming literature on positive psychology and neuroscience to identify the practices that work best for them, along with an appreciation for the notion that finding and keeping happiness and well-being requires intentional practice and maintenance. Students should come prepared to engage in meaningful self-work.

All of us today live in a technology-rich environment, which is not only different from the one in which we grew up but also is still changing and evolving rapidly. The course examines the use and design of an array of educational technologies (computer programs, multimedia software, television, video games, websites, and so on) from the perspective of basic research and theory in the human cognitive system, development psychology, and social development areas. The course aims to provide a framework for reasoning about the most developmentally appropriate uses of technologies for children and young adults at different ages. Some of the significant questions that we will focus on include: How are their developmental experiences affected by these technologies? What are the advantages and disadvantages for children using technology, especially for learning? In this class, we will try to touch upon these issues by reading classic literature, researching articles, playing games, watching programs, using apps, and discussing our experiences. Projects and assignments will include weekly class discussions on peer-reviewed journal articles and media artifact critiques written by individual students and through group project work.

Why is the topic of laughter so often siloed or scorned in discussions of high art, literature, and the sciences? Why don’t we take laughter seriously as a society? How many professors does it take to teach a course on laughter? (Two more than usual...) In this lecture-seminar, students will develop a highly interdisciplinary understanding of laughter as a human behavior, cultural practice, and wide-ranging tool for creative expression. Based on the expertise of the three professors, lectures will primarily investigate laughter through the lens of psychology, film history, and visual arts. The goal of the course is to think and play across many disciplines. For class assignments, students may be asked to conduct scientific studies of audience laughter patterns, create works of art with punchlines, or write close analyses of classic cinematic gags. Over the course of the semester, we will examine the building blocks of laughter; classic devices of modern comedy; and laughter as a force of resilience, resistance, and regeneration. Topics to be discussed include the evolutionary roots of laughter as a behavior; the psychological substrates of laughter as a mode of emotional and self-regulation; humor in Dada, surrealism, performance art, and stand-up comedy; jokes and the unconscious; comic entanglements of modern bodies and machines; hysterical audiences of early cinema; and how to read funny faces, word play, spit takes, toilet humor, and sound gags.

The concepts of cognitive biases and heuristics were empirically explored in social psychology more than 50 years ago. The seminal contributions of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman showed that people do not behave according to perfect rationality and logic. On the contrary, several extraneous factors influence people’s decision-making, especially when facing uncertainty. Cognitive biases are systematic errors in our thinking, while heuristics relate to the use of shortcuts in processing information. They both lead to errors in our thinking, causing us to draw incorrect conclusions. This seminar explores our use of mental shortcuts in making judgments about others and drawing inferences about the world. We will review these biases and heuristics as part of our automatic intuitive system of thinking and explore the possibility of overcoming these shortcomings to become better critical thinkers.

Mindfulness can be described as nonjudgmental attention to experiences in the present moment. For thousands of years, mindfulness has been cultivated through the practice of meditation. More recently, developments in neuroimaging technologies have allowed scientists to explore the brain changes that result from the pursuit of this ancient practice, laying the foundations of the new field of contemplative neuroscience. Study of the neurology of mindfulness meditation provides a useful lens for study of the brain in general, because so many aspects of psychological functioning are affected by the practice. Some of the topics that we will address are attention, perception, emotion and its regulation, mental imaging, habit, and consciousness. This is a good course for those interested in scientific study of the mind and body. An important component of the course is the personal cultivation of a mindfulness practice; to support this goal, one of the two weekly course meetings will be devoted to a mindful movement practice.

Psychological trauma has been described as unspeakable—so cognitively disorganizing and intense that it is difficult to put into words the experience and the emotions that it evokes. Yet, the language that survivors use to describe their traumas provides insight into the impact of trauma and the process of recovery. This course will begin with an overview of theories of trauma, resilience, and post-traumatic growth, as well as an introduction to the study of trauma narratives and how language reflects emotional and cognitive functioning. We will then explore different aspects of the cognitive, emotional, and biological impact of undergoing a trauma and how these changes are reflected in the language that trauma survivors use as they speak and write about their experiences. We will consider works by experts on trauma and language, including Judith Herman, Bessel van der Kolk, and James Pennebaker, as well as current research in the field of trauma and trauma narratives. Through these readings, we will address topics such as what makes an experience traumatic, how representations of trauma in popular culture color our perceptions of trauma and recovery, the role of resilience and growth following a trauma, and what we can learn from attending to the content and structure of language. This course will be of interest to students who are curious about how the words we use reflect our cognitive and emotional functioning, especially for students interested in pursuing topics such as these at an advanced or graduate level.

Play provides us with an amazing and informative lens for observing the development and complex inner lives of young children. Yet, play is being threatened by increasing amounts of time spent on technology and a growing societal focus on scheduled activities and academic goals. This course will offer an introduction to the many fascinating aspects of play, including the importance of unstructured free play, how play shapes the brain, sensory processing and self-regulation in play, outdoor play, cultural contexts of play, and humor development in play. Through readings, video illustrations, and discussion of student fieldwork at the Early Childhood Center, we will explore the many ways in which play contributes to the complex social, cognitive, emotional, and imaginative lives of children. This course will provide a foundation for the spring course, Early Intervention Approaches for Young Children and Families.

This first research seminar in a yearlong practicum series on conducting research in psychology will introduce students to the posing of research questions and the design of methods to answer those questions. In this seminar, students will gain valuable research experience through a weekly meeting focused on qualitative and quantitative research methods, research ethics, and contemporary research questions and approaches. These topics include, but are not limited to, exploring the historical contexts that led to current guidelines for ethically conducting human-subjects testing; receiving institutional review-board approval for a proposed study; staying conversant and engaged in open science practices; maintaining a lab notebook; choosing a methodological approach and designing a study; recruiting participants; and more. The seminar component will include readings on, and discussions of, research methods and ethics that are specific to the research in which students are involved, as well as discussions of contemporary research articles that are relevant to student and faculty research projects. Weekly seminars will be led by the instructors of the course and, on occasion, invited faculty with expertise in related topics. All students involved in conducting research will also take turns leading a discussion of current research related to their group’s work. We will have individual and/or lab conference meetings with faculty supervisors on either a regular or as-needed basis. Seniors undertaking a senior thesis project are welcome to take this class alongside their senior thesis in order to work collaboratively with other students engaging in their own independent research. Students should come prepared to work collaboratively with faculty and their peers.

By the time you read this course description, you have learned more than 40,000 English words. That’s at least an average of six words per day—and many more if you are multilingual. How is this possible? Were you born with this ability? Or did you learn it? This course is about how humans come to develop language so early and so quickly among striking environmental variation. For example, caregivers in the United States often alter and repeat their words when talking to children, while caregivers in a Tseltal Mayan community are thought to speak directly to other adults, not children. And yet, children in both settings successfully learn language on similar timescales. Importantly, no two children are alike. We will explore how the spectrum of neurodiversity sets many learners on their own communicative path. We will also consider variation in modality: Babies in deaf communities rapidly learn to comprehend and produce sign. We’ll begin by looking at the experimental data: How do you truly unlock and measure a neonate’s language abilities? Or even an adult’s? We’ll find out. Next, we’ll use play with gadgets from experimental methods, such as artificial language learning and eye-tracking, designing our own ministudies, implementing them, and collecting data. Then, we’ll propose theories of the kind of learning mechanism that can operate under such diverse inputs. We’ll evaluate the existing proposals and try to generate our own new theories of language development. We will bring these ideas beyond the seminar room, drawing connections to second-language learning in adults, early-childhood education, and social and economic structures. Students will develop conference projects that propose their own theories of language learning rooted in experimental data and in conversation with existing theories of nature vs. nurture, domain-specificity, and modality.

Why is the topic of laughter so often siloed or scorned in discussions of high art, literature, and the sciences? Why don’t we take laughter seriously as a society? How many professors does it take to teach a course on laughter? (Two more than usual!) In this lecture-seminar, students will develop a highly interdisciplinary understanding of laughter as a human behavior, cultural practice, and wide-ranging tool for creative expression. Based on the expertise of the three professors, lectures will primarily investigate laughter through the lens of psychology, film history, and visual arts. The goal of the course is to think and play across many disciplines. For class assignments, students may be asked to conduct scientific studies of audience laughter patterns, create works of art with punchlines, or write close analyses of classic cinematic gags. Over the course of the semester, we will examine the building blocks of laughter; classic devices of modern comedy; and laughter as a force of resilience, resistance, and regeneration. Topics to be discussed include the evolutionary roots of laughter as a behavior; the psychological substrates of laughter as a mode of emotional and self-regulation; humor in Dada, surrealism, performance art, and stand-up comedy; jokes and the unconscious; comic entanglements of modern bodies and machines; hysterical audiences of early cinema; and how to read funny faces, word play, spit takes, toilet humor, and sound gags.

Who doesn’t love Frog and Toad? Have you ever wanted to write something like it—or like Charlotte’s Web or A Snowy Day? Why do our favorites work so well and so (almost) universally? We will begin by reading books we know and books we missed and discuss what makes them so good. We will be looking at read-to books, early readers, instructional books for children, rude books, chapter books, books about friendship, and (possibly) young adult books. We may consider what good children’s history and biography might be like. We will talk about the place of the visual, the careful and conscious use of language, notions of appropriateness, and what works at various age levels. Invariably, we will talk about childhood, our own and as part of an ever-changing set of social theories. We will try our hand at writing picture books, early readers, friendship stories, collections of poems like Mother Goose. Conference work will involve making a children’s book of any kind, on any level. Classes will be in both lecture and conversational mode, and group conferences will involve looking at our writing.

This is a course with writing at its center and other arts—mainly, but not exclusively, visual—around it. We will read all kinds of narratives, children’s books, folk tales, fairy tales, graphic novels...and try our hand at many of them. Class reading will include everything from ancient Egyptian love poems to contemporary Latin American literature. For conference work, students have created graphic novels, animations, quilts, a scientifically accurate fantasy involving bugs, rock operas, items of clothing with text attached, nonfiction narratives, and dystopian fictions with pictures. There will be weekly assignments that involve making something. This course is especially suited to students with an interest in another art or a body of knowledge that they’d like to make accessible to nonspecialists.