2008-09 Catalog: Psychology

The study of how people think about other people and behave toward or around others. Topics include attribution, social cognition, motivation and incentive, social influence, liking, stereotyping, deception, fairness and altruism, and conformity.

A descriptive and theoretical survey of the major forms of psychopathology in children, adolescents, and adults. The course will examine current trends and research in the fields of mental health and psychopathology.

This course will develop basic concepts in how humans process different kinds of information such as visual, auditory, and symbolic. These concepts will then be used to explore topics such as visual perception, attention and automaticity, working and long-term memory, imagery, knowledge representation, language acquisition and comprehension, judgement and choice, reasoning and decision making, problem solving, and group differences.

Introduction to the computations made by the brain during economic and social decision making and their neural substrates. First quarter: Signal detection theory. Unconscious and conscious processing. Emotion and the somatic marker hypothesis. Perceptual decision making. Reinforcement learning. Goal and habit learning. Facial processing in social neuroscience. Second quarter: Optimal Bayesian decision making and prospect theory. Standard and behavioral game theory. Evolution and group decision making. Collective decision making by animals.

This course covers tools and statistical methods used in cognitive neuroscience research. Topics vary from year to year depending on the interests of the students. Recent topics include statistical modeling for fMRI data, experimental design for fMRI, and the preprocessing of fMRI data.

What are the correlates of consciousness in the brain? The course provides a framework for beginning to address this question using a reductionist point of view. It focuses on the neurophysiology of the primate visual system, but also discusses alternative approaches more suitable for work with rodents. Topics to be covered include the anatomy and physiology of the primate's visual system (striate and extrastriate cortical areas, dorsal/ventral distinction, visual-frontal connections), iconic and working memory, selective visual attention, visual illusions, clinical studies (neglect, blind sight, split-brain, agnosia), direct stimulation of the brain, delay and trace associative conditioning, conscious and unconscious olfactory processing, and philosophical approaches to consciousness.

Same as Psy 25, but for graduate credit. Not available for credit toward humanities-social science requirement.

Fundamental issues in emotion research at multiple levels of experimental analysis, and in species ranging from humans to mice to flies. Psychological theories and data from studies in humans will be presented to clarify the relationship between emotional behavior, affect, feelings, and moods, which in turn will form the basis for exploring whether and how different animal models can be used to investigate the neural circuit and molecular bases of emotion. Can genetically tractable model organisms such as flies show "emotional behavior," or have "feelings"? What have we learned from animal models about the neural circuit and genetic bases of emotional behavior, and how does it relate to what we know from human studies? Disorders of emotion will also be discussed, including affective disorders in humans, and their potential animal models.

This course explores the role of automatic and deliberative processes on consumer decision making from the perspectives of computational neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience, psychology, and behavioral economics.

This course will cover recent findings in the psychology and neurobiology of emotion and social behavior. What role does emotion play in other cognitive processes, such as memory, attention, and decision making? What are the component processes that guide social behavior? To what extent is the processing of social information domain-specific? Readings from the current literature will emphasize functional imaging, psychophysical, and lesion studies in humans.