| Professor | TA | |
| Name: | Randy O'Reilly | Philip Branning |
| Office: | Muen D-251C | Muen D-313D |
| Phone: | 303-492-0054 | n/a |
| Email: |
| philip.branning@colorado.edu |
| Office Hours: | Mon 3-4 | TBD |
Text: O'Reilly, R. C. and Munakata, Y. (2000). Computational Explorations in Cognitive Neuroscience: Understanding the Mind by Simulating the Brain. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Goals:
How does the brain secrete the mind? This course will
introduce you to the ideas and methods in computational cognitive
neuroscience that have been applied to answering this question.
Specifically, we focus on simulating cognitive and perceptual
processes using neural network models. These models provide a bridge
between behavioral and biological levels of analysis. We start by
understanding the basic computational and biological properties of
individual neurons and networks of neurons, which give rise to basic
processing mechanisms like spreading activation, inhibition, and
multiple constraint satisfaction. We then discuss learning mechanisms
(self-organizing and error-driven), which all networks of neurons
require to perform any reasonably complex task. We will examine a
range of cognitive phenomena within this framework, including
attention, memory, language, and higher-level cognition. The
overarching goal is to use simulations to help us to understand how
our neurons give rise to our thoughts.
Full Syllabus: Online Version -- or -- PDF Version (for printing)
Downloading anything: Overall course FTP site
Note: I reserve the right to update these up to the night before lecture, so if you want the absolute freshest version, you might print it out the morning of.
Last updated: 01/17/06
