Whether other animals have minds that are anything like ours is a problem that has long excited (and challenged) scientists and philosophers. This course will be a reading seminar in which we examine an array of difficult questions about the cognitive abilities of non-human animals: Is consciousness a uniquely human property? Can other animals hold beliefs? Can they represent concepts (and what is a concept, anyway)? Do animals acquire "knowledge?" How might it be related to the kind of justification or understanding that is a requirement when we say that a human knows something?

Students will design, develop, and publish a digital game in a single semester under the leadership and guidance of Professors Fay and Perry. Though the professors will provide team leadership and game direction, the students will be the ones creating the game, including game design, concept art, storyboards, modeling, rigging, animation, shading, lighting, compositing, game programming, tool programming, project management, audio design, marketing, and publishing.

Artificial Intelligence is a branch of computer science concerned with the development of computer systems that "think." In this course we will explore the core ideas of artificial intelligence through readings, presentations, discussions, and hands-on programming activities. A range of practical artificial intelligence techniques will be covered, and students will complete programming projects to demonstrate engagement with the themes of the course. Prerequisite: One programming course (in any language).

All students in the cognitive, neural, and psychological sciences should be familiar with certain key concepts. This course surveys these central ideas to give students the vocabulary needed to approach the research literature without being intimidated by a barrage of technical terms and to hold intelligent conversations with other students and faculty members who are interested in matters of mind, brain, and machine. Readings in the course will be drawn from books and journals in the field. Students will complete a series of essay assignments concerning the concepts covered in the course.

In this course we will discuss the processes by which children come to acquire, recall, and use knowledge. This course will focus on development from infancy to middle childhood. By reading primary literature, we will examine the emergence and refinement of children's ability to form concepts, recall the past, and extend knowledge to new situations. We will consider methodological challenges and approaches to studying children's abilities, including naturalistic observations, and controlled laboratory studies.

Language is paramount among the capacities that characterize humans. We hold language as a marker of our humanity, and by understanding language we assume that we will understand something important about ourselves. In this course we will ask, and try to answer questions such as the following: What's so special about language? How do we produce sentences? How do we understand them? What might cause us to fail at either task? What is meaning, and how does language express it? Is our capacity for language a biological endowment unique to the human species?

Every society offers public rituals, formal instruction and places of sacred memory whose purpose is to foster a common political identity like nationalism. Some of these devices appear natural and timeless; others are obviously invented. Some exist in peaceful periods; others are meant to galvanize people for warfare. This course, whose focus is the contemporary US, introduces their analysis. We will explore conceptions of citizenship, history teaching, wartime censorship, conspiracy thinking and life-style politics.

This course surveys the main theoretical ideas in ethology, the scientific study of animal behavior. We explore the physiological, developmental, functional and evolutionary bases of behavior as well as related issues in the study of cognition. The main reading and discussion material for the course is drawn from journal articles in the professional scientific literature; students are also expected to read John Alcock's standard textbook, Animal Behavior.

In this introductory course, students will explore the history, practices, career options, and problems of environmental education - educational efforts promoting an understanding of nature, environmentally responsible behavior, and protection of natural resources. Shifts in environmental education research foci, relationships to current and past environmental challenges (e.g., air pollution, species loss, climate change), and differences between U.S. and international efforts will be discussed.

The problem of explaining how the brain enables human conscious experience remains a great mystery of human knowledge. This course is an introduction to cognitive neuroscience in which we will attempt to examine the neural underpinnings of the mind's complex processes, paying particular attention to vision, attention, and memory. Cognitive neuroscience incorporates elements of physiological psychology, neuroscience, cognitive psychology and neuropsychology.