Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Lab

Location: Muenzinger E311, Clipr Seuss XTerminal Room

Website: http://psych.colorado.edu/~oreilly/cogsim.html

Section 101: Wednesday 2-4pm

Section 102: Friday 9am-11am

Makeups: After class Tuesday and Thursday

TA: Philip Branning

Office: Muenzinger D-313D

Web: http://psych-srv3.colorado.edu/~branning/

Email: philip.branning@colorado.edu

Lab: there is a weekly two-hour lab session that is supervised by the teaching assistant, where students obtain in-depth hands-on experience with the computer simulation explorations. These explorations are the centerpiece of the course, and provide a unique exploratory learning opportunity. You will perform many what-if scenarios to understand what aspects of the brain’s biology are important for producing specific cognitive phenomena. You will simulate the effects of brain damage in these models, to understand neuropsychology (the study of brain-damaged patients). The computer models enable complete control and dynamic, colorful visualization of these explorations, providing a unique ability to understand how cognition emerges from the brain. You will document these explorations by answering the simulation exercises’ questions (to be worked on during the lab sessions). You should be able to do most, hopefully all, of the required homework during these lab sessions.

Simulation Exercises: The simulation exercises are interspersed throughout the text. Unless otherwise noted, you should answer all of the exercise questions for each chapter, turning them in in class or the TA's box on the date shown in the schedule. Although you will be working on these exercises in the labs, you must write them up individually. We want to see that each person individually understands the material, so this should be evident in your writeup. It is best to write down results and first drafts of answers as you work through the exercises -- they can take a while to run and you don't want to have to run them repeatedly. Exercises turned in late will be penalized 5% for each day after the due date.

Evaluation: Your grade will be based on three components in the following proportions:

Simulation exercises 40%

Reading reactions 20%

Final project 30%

Class participation 10%

Simulation Pragmatics: To run the simulations, you need to take the following steps:

* Login to the machine using your identikey account.

* Start the X11 application, which is in Applications/Utilities/X11 in the Finder.

* Start the leabra++ application in Applications/CogNeuroSims/leabra++.

* You can drag these items into the dock to make them show up there next time.

* Note: when you quit, you may need to click in the leabra++ shell terminal window, and hit Return before it will actually quit..

If you want to work on your own machine

You can also download the software (from http://psych.colorado.edu/~oreilly/cecn_download.html) to run on your own machines. Most major platforms are supported: Linux, Mac, Windows, Sun, SGI, HP.