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    PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE | Science of Living Systems 20 


    Semester: 

    Spring

    Offered: 

    2011
    website
    Undergraduate General Education course
    No prerequisites

    Lectures: Tuesday & Thursday 2:30-4, Science Center C

    Discussion section: various times


    An introduction to the workings of the human psyche as illuminated by experimental psychology, neuroscience, genetics, evolution, artificial intelligence, and the social sciences. The course will introduce major approaches to the study of the mind such as psychoanalysis, behaviorism, cognitive neuroscience, and evolutionary psychology; controversies such as nature-nurture, consciousness...

    Read more about PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE | Science of Living Systems 20 


    PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE: TALKING POINTS | Psychology 3500

    Semester: 

    Spring

    Offered: 

    2011

    Graduate course
    Enrollment is limited to teaching fellows for "The Human Mind" and graduate students who have obtained the permission of the instructor
    Thursday 3:30-5:30
    A graduate companion course to "The Human Mind," which explores the theories and controversies in greater depth. Topics include nature and nurture, reductionism, determinism, religion and science, consciousness, violence, politics, sex differences, and rationality.

    Learnability and Cognition: The Acquisition of Argument Structure
    Pinker, S. (1989). Learnability and Cognition: The Acquisition of Argument Structure . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Abstract

    "A monumental study that sets a new standard for work on learnability."
    —Ray Jackendoff

    In tackling a learnability paradox that has challenged scholars for more than a decade—how children acquire predicate-argument structures in their language—Steven Pinker synthesizes a vast literature in the fields of linguistics and psycholinguistics, and outlines explicit theories of the mental representation, the learning, and the development of verb meaning and verb syntax. He describes a new theory that has some surprising implications for the relation between language and thought.

    REVIEWS
    Review Excerpts

    AVAILABLE AT:
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    The Best American Science and Nature Writing
    Pinker, S. (2004). The Best American Science and Nature Writing . Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.Abstract

    "A provocative and thoroughly enjoyable [collection] from start to finish."—Publishers Weekly

    Here is the best and newest on science and nature: the psychology of suicide terrorism, desperate measures in surgery, the weird world of octopuses, Sex Week at Yale, the linguistics of click languages, the worst news about cloning, and much more.  Chapters by Scott Atran, Ronald Bailey, Philip M. Boffey, Austin Bunn, Jennet Conant, Daniel C. Dennett, Gregg Easterbrook, Garrett G. Fagan, Jeffrey M. Friedman, Atul Gawande, Horace Freeland Judson, Geoffrey Nunberg, Mike O'Connor, Peggy Orenstein, Virginia Postrel, Jonathan Rauch, Chet Raymo, Ron Rosenbaum, Steve Sailer, Robert Sapolsky, Eric Scigliano, Meredith F. Small, Max Tegmark, and Nicholas Wade.

    AVAILABLE AT:
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    Barnes & Noble
    IndieBound

    Lexical and Conceptual Semantics
    Pinker, S., & Levin, B. (1991). Lexical and Conceptual Semantics . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Abstract

    How are words represented in the mind and woven into sentences? How do children learn how to use words? Currently there is a tremendous resurgence of interest in lexical semantics. Word meanings have become increasingly important in linguistic theories because syntactic constructions are sensitive to the words they contain. In computational linguistics, new techniques are being applied to analyze words in texts, and machine-readable dictionaries are being used to build lexicons for natural language systems. These technologies provide large amounts of data and powerful data-analysis techniques to theoretical linguists, who can repay the favor to computer science by describing how one efficient lexical system, the human mind, represents word meanings. Lexical semantics provides crucial evidence to psychologists, too, about the innate stuff out of which concepts are made. Finally, it has become central to the study of child language acquisition. Infants are not born knowing a language, but they do have some understanding of the conceptual world that their parents describe in their speech. Since concepts are intimately tied to word meanings, knowledge of semantics might help children break into the rest of the language system. Lexical and Conceptual Semantics offers views from a variety of disciplines of these sophisticated new approaches to understanding the mental dictionary.

    AVAILABLE AT:
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    Connections and Symbols
    Pinker, S., & Mehler, J. (1988). Connections and Symbols . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Abstract

    Does intelligence result from the manipulation of structured symbolic expressions? Or is it the result of the activation of large networks of densely interconnected simple units? Connections and Symbols provides the first systematic analysis of the explosive new field of connectionism that is challenging the basic tenets of cognitive science. These lively discussions by Jerry A. Fodor, Zenon W. Pylyshyn, Steven Pinker, Alan Prince, Joel Lechter, and Thomas G. Bever raise issues that lie at the core of our understanding of how the mind works: Does connectionism offer a truly new scientific model or does it merely cloak the old notion of associationism as a central doctrine of learning and mental functioning? Which of the new empirical generalizations are sound and which are false? And which of the many ideas such as massively parallel processing, distributed representation, constraint satisfaction, and subsymbolic or microfeatural analyses belong together, and which are logically independent? Now that connectionism has arrived with full-blown models of psychological processes as diverse as Pavlovian conditioning, visual recognition, and language acquisition, the debate is on. Common themes emerge from all the contributors to Connections and Symbols: criticism of connectionist models applied to language or the parts of cognition employing language—like operations; and a focus on what it is about human cognition that supports the traditional physical symbol system hypothesis. While criticizing many aspects of connectionist models, the authors also identify aspects of cognition that could be explained by the connectionist models.

    AVAILABLE AT:
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    Visual Cognition: Computational Models of Cognition and Perception
    Pinker, S. (1986). Visual Cognition: Computational Models of Cognition and Perception . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Abstract

    How do we recognize objects? How do we reason about objects when they are absent and only in memory? How do we conceptualize the three dimensions of space? Do different people do these things in different ways? And where are these abilities located in the brain? During the past decade cognitive scientists have devised new experimental techniques; researchers in artificial intelligence have devised new ways of modeling cognitive processes on computers; neuropsychologists are testing new models of brain organization.. Many of these developments are represented in this collection of essays. The papers, though reporting work at the cutting edge of their fields, do not assume a highly technical background on the part of readers, and the volume begins with a tutorial introduction by the editor, making the book suitable for specialists and non-specialists alike.

    AVAILABLE AT:
    Amazon
    Amazon UK
    Barnes & Noble
    IndieBound

    Michel, J. - B., Shen, Y. K., Aiden, A. P., Veres, A., Gray, M. K., Team, T. G. B., Pickett, J. P., et al. (2011). Quantitative analysis of culture using millions of digitized books. Science , 331, 176-182.Abstract

    We constructed a corpus of digitized texts containing about 4% of all books ever printed. Analysis of this corpus enables us to investigate cultural trends quantitatively. We survey the vast terrain of ‘culturomics,’ focusing on linguistic and cultural phenomena that were reflected in the English language between 1800 and 2000. We show how this approach can provide insights about fields as diverse as lexicography, the evolution of grammar, collective memory, the adoption of technology, the pursuit of fame, censorship, and historical epidemiology. Culturomics extends the boundaries of rigorous quantitative inquiry to a wide array of new phenomena spanning the social sciences and the humanities.

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