Winter 2025

In 25W at 2A, Matthijs van der Meer​

Can rats empathize with others, or experience regret? Can birds grasp the intentions of others, or imagine the future? Do dogs deliberately deceive their human companions? This seminar will explore the cognitive abilities of a range of animals through the careful analysis of behavior, defining rigorous and measurable criteria for inferring complex behaviors, and contrasting them with simpler alternatives. We will draw on neural data, asking if phenomena such as creativity, mental time travel, and theory of mind can be detected based on the observation of brain activity. Finally, we will consider questions relevant to human health: can mice become schizophrenic, chronically depressed, or develop post-traumatic stress disorder? Lively discussion in the classroom is encouraged.

Approved course for the Neuroscience major/minor.
Prerequisite: PSYC 22 or PSYC 28; and instructor permission via the department website

In 25W at 10, Jeremy Manning

Humanity creates nearly 350 TB of data each day, and much of it is freely available for us to download.  But making sense of that staggering amount of text, video, audio, and other forms of data is like drinking from a firehose: the sheer quantity of data makes it tricky to make sense of what it means.  In this course we will study how to find, clean, analyze, make sense of, and communicate about complex data.

In addition to helping you to build up your data science toolbox, the course is centered around telling engaging, compelling, (often) entertaining, and, above all, clear "stories" about data.  This will require considering your audience's mindset, goals, motivations, and backgrounds, and then leveraging those considerations to develop effective ways of conveying the major plot points.

Prerequisite: Instructor permission via the department website.

In 25W at 2A, Luke Chang

How do beliefs affect clinical outcomes?  This course provides an in-depth examination of the role of beliefs and expectations in the manifestation of psychological symptoms and their treatment. Topics to be covered include the psychological and biological bases of pharmacological placebo effects, the mechanisms underlying psychotherapy (e.g., patient and provider expectations), and also how cultural expectations impact how psychological symptoms are experienced (e.g., hallucinations, delusions, and somatization).

Prerequisite: PSYC 1 or PSYC 6; and instructor permission via the department website

See Independent Research for more info on PSYC 70 (Neuroscience Research), PSYC 88 (Independent Psychology Research), and PSYC 90 (Independent Neuroscience Research).

See Psychology Honors for more info on PSYC 89 (Honors Psychology Research)

See Neuroscience Honors for more info on PSYC 91 (Honors Neuroscience Research)