| Professor | TA | |
| Name: | Randy O'Reilly | Bill Bonk |
| Office: | Muen D-251C | Muen E-235 |
| Phone: | 303 492-0054 | 303 492-1278 |
| Email: | | Bonk@colorado.edu |
| Office Hours: | Mon 3-4; Fri 2-3 | Tues/Thurs 11-12 |
Text: Willingham (2001). Cognition: The Thinking Animal. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Goals: The ability to engage in complex cognition is what differentiates us from other species in the animal kingdom. It is central to what makes us human, and it supports everything we do in school, work, conversation, etc. Cognition is what allows you to read these words and make sense of what they say, and remember what they said a few hours and (possibly) days later. The average person usually takes all of this for granted, but in fact the mysteries of how the brain carries out all of these cognitive processes are deep and fascinating. In this course, we explore all major aspects of cognition including perception (e.g., the process of reading words or identifying objects), attention (e.g., focusing on one word at a time out of many on the page), memory (e.g., remembering the words later), decision making (e.g., should I take this course or another one?), problem solving (e.g., figuring out what you need to do to graduate), and language (e.g., making sense of these words). We approach these topics using a variety of methods, including behavioral studies, neural imaging and recording studies, and computational models.
NOTE: The final is: Friday Dec 14, 7:30-10:00pm (this was missing from syllabus).
Full Syllabus: Online Version -- or -- PDF Version (for printing)
Downloading anything: Overall course FTP site
You need to have the Adobe Acrobat Reader to read these PDF (portable document format) files.
To convert your percentage into a letter grade, the grading scale is a standard one: 100-93 = A, 93-90 = A-, 90-87 = B+, 87-83 = B, etc. Numbers on the boundary round up, e.g., 93 = A.
Last updated: 12/19/01