Description
 
Application Form

BCSC 206: Undergraduate Research in Cognitive Science

Prerequisites and Requirements:

  • Applications are accepted from all students. If we run out of space, priority will be given to rising juniors who are declared BCS majors (or planning to declare soon), as well as rising sophomores who intend to declare a BCS major.
  • Students must commit to enrolling in BCSC 206 in the fall and BCSC 207 the following spring. It is not possible to take just one of the two courses, nor is it possible to take them out of sequence.
  • Enrollment will be capped at 20 students who will be allowed to register with permission of the instructor. Interested students must complete the application form.
  • Considerable facility with computer programming is required. Students must have completed at least one semester of a computer programming course, or have equivalent experience that can be documented. Experience with Matlab, Python, or R is desirable but experience with other programming languages is also acceptable.
  • Students should have taken at least 2 of the following 5 courses prior to enrolling: BCSC110, BCSC111, BCSC151, BCSC152, BCS153.
  • Students should have taken a statistics course (e.g., STAT212) or will need to take it concurrently with BCSC206 in the first semester of this sequence.

Offered: Fall

Registration is by permission of instructor. Successful applicants will be provided a permission code to register.

BCS offers a year-long research course for undergraduate BCS majors. The goal of the 1st semester (BCSC206) is for students to gain experience with research methods in cognitive science by performing a project that involves replicating an important finding in the field. The goal of the 2nd semester (BCSC207) is to perform a more substantial original research project that builds upon the first semester project to address a novel research question. The course will consist of a combination of weekly class-based meetings and group-based reading and research under the supervision of the course instructors, with the help of a faculty mentor for each research group.

Students will work collaboratively in small groups, and will gain extensive hands-on experience with critical analysis of scientific literature, experimental design, programming of stimuli and behavioral tasks, data collection, statistical analysis, oral presentation, and writing of research manuscripts. The end-goal of the course is for each group to produce a research manuscript that may be of sufficient quality to be submitted for publication.

Students who enroll must also enroll in BCSC 207 in the following semester.