Domesticated animals - agricultural livestock such as sheep, cattle, pigs, and chickens as well as companion animals like dogs and cats - are of deep importance to human society. The primary focus of the course is on how domestication shapes the mental and behavioral characteristics of these animals. We also explore related issues in human-animal interaction, animal welfare, and agricultural practice.

In this course, students will delve deeper into game development by getting practice working as a specialized member of a small team. Students will continue to hone game development skills, taking on one of four possible roles: Programmer, Modeler/Animator, Painter, or Audio designer/Project Manager. All students will contribute to the game design. The course will use Unity 3D as the game engine, which is used in many professional game development projects.

This course is an upper-level research seminar designed for students who wish to learn electrophysiological techniques and how to apply those techniques to answer research questions in the domain of cognitive psychology and cognitive neuropsychology. In this years course students will help design a study of attention, run participants, and analyze the data. Additionally, they will have the opportunity to develop an original research project from conception through piloting participants.

Schools operate on the idea that learners are "regular" or "special needs." This course examines these ideas, exploring topics related to a variety of learning differences including ADD and autism, as well as factors that influence a child's readiness to learn.

Human social interaction relies upon the ability to correctly attribute beliefs, goals, and percepts to other people. This set of meta-representational abilities--a "theory of mind"--allows us to understand the behavior of others. Individuals with autism are often thought to lack a theory of mind as they show impairments on tasks testing this ability, as well as impairments on tasks involving language and face processing.

This course presents Semantics as a cognitive phenomenon: what aspects of the representation of reality are relevant for speakers when they use language to convey meaningful utterances? The first part of this course will provide basic insights into classic topics in Semantics such as the nature of meaning, the problem of sense and reference, lexical semantics, meaning as logic form, and meaning as context of use. The second part will explore the relation between language and cognition from a cognitive-functional framework (Cognitive Semantics).

Bigger-sized software programs, which are developed through a longer span of time, require looking into aspects of the software development cycle that are not necessary for smaller projects. This course will expose students to the design, implementation, testing, and maintenance of this type of projects, putting particular but not exclusive emphasis on agile development methods. Students will be involved in the actual GROUP implementation of a major piece of software, in conditions similar to those found in industry.

Many people have opinions about the best ways to improve education, yet few people have conducted research in educational settings. However, improving education requires evidence gathered systematically through research. In this course, students will learn methods for conducting research on learning and teaching that yield evidence leading to program improvements. Methodologies include classroom and field trip observations, interview, survey, pre-post assessment, and discourse analysis.

How do words and sentences do it? How do they get and keep their meaning and reference? How can the word "London" attach itself to London, its meaning travelling at high speed like a guided missile through space for over 5000 kilometers before ending up, safely in London - and never missing its target? Or does the word refer to an idea in the mind? But then how does that idea attach itself to London, its sense travelling at high speed like a guided missile . . .

The future of media "functionalities" - what media do, not the objects that they are - is likely to entail their ubiquity, embedded and distributed throughout the spaces where people live. There is a hint of this already in the way we use smartphones. They are portable, personalizable, multi-functional and almost never disconnected from the web. This advanced seminar will explore theories and case studies that suggest how this near-term media future may come about.